


Some Stars Are Not Enough

by Antilocapra



Category: Among Us (Video Game), HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Among Us (Video Game) Setting, Betrayal, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Enemies to Friends, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, HOW does HLVRAI STILL not have its own tag?, Identity Issues, Internal Conflict, M/M, Multi, Secrets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:40:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27492823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antilocapra/pseuds/Antilocapra
Summary: The blare of the emergency meeting alarm made Gordon jump and drop the wires he was teasing back together with a startled curse. At his feet, Joshua looked up, and Gordon could see his stern little face through the child-sized visor as he pursed his lips.“Dad, why are there so many meetings on this ship?”Gordon sighed and swung Joshua up onto his shoulders before moving out of the electrical room and heading up through storage toward the cafeteria at a brisk trot. “This is a different kind of ship than we’re used to, buddy. It’s not a transport, remember? It’s a mission ship. And there were some, uh, issues with the last ones, remember how we talked about that? So if anyone sees anything weird, they have to call a meeting about it, and we all have to make sure to show up as soon as possible.”He felt the thud of Joshua flopping dramatically over the top of his helmet. “But this is the third one today, and they’re soboring,” Joshua whined. “Everyone just stands around and talks.”Gordon chuckled as he stepped into the main conference room. “Yeah, bud, that’s what a meeting is. You’ve broken it down to the bare essentials.”HLVRAI/Among Us Crossover AU
Relationships: Benrey/Gordon Freeman, Bubby/Dr. Coomer (Half-Life)
Comments: 131
Kudos: 252





	1. Ship of Fools

**Author's Note:**

> Well golly gee willikers, look at the time; it's time for another HLVRAI fic, before I've even finished the last one! I will definitely post the last chapter of _Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Bees_ this week like I said I would, but I got a brainworm and I had to let it out. I was surprised not to see more fics in this AU - it seems kinda perfect for the ragtag Science Team.  
> I have a fair amount of outlining done but it's pretty vague, so not sure how long this'll ultimately be. I'll update the tags, summary, etc as we go along. As always, thank you for reading, and comments are always loved and appreciated!

The blare of the emergency meeting alarm made Gordon jump and drop the wires he was teasing back together with a startled curse. At his feet, Joshua looked up, and Gordon could see his stern little face through the child-sized visor as he pursed his lips.

“Dad, why are there so many meetings on this ship?”

Gordon sighed and swung Joshua up onto his shoulders before moving out of the electrical room and heading up through storage toward the cafeteria at a brisk trot. “This is a different kind of ship than we’re used to, buddy. It’s not a transport, remember? It’s a mission ship. And there were some, uh, issues with the last ones, remember how we talked about that? So if anyone sees anything weird, they have to call a meeting about it, and we all have to make sure to show up as soon as possible.”

He felt the thud of Joshua flopping dramatically over the top of his helmet. “But this is the third one today, and they’re so _boring_ ,” Joshua whined. “Everyone just stands around and talks.”

Gordon chuckled as he stepped into the main conference room-slash-cafeteria. “Yeah, bud, that’s what a meeting is. You’ve broken it down to the bare essentials.”

“Like ‘bear necessities’?” Joshua asked, perking up.

“Yeah, kind of.” Gordon reached up and swung Joshie down as he stepped up to the conference table, plunking him down underneath it where he had already left some coloring books. “Now be patient for a bit, and we’ll go to one of the observation windows after this, okay?”

“Not doing your tasks, huh, Freeman?”

Gordon took a moment to gather himself, then looked up and glared across the table at Forzen. He didn’t even know if it was the guy’s first or last name, and he didn’t care to find out. Forzen had been a colossal asshole for the week-long training they all had to attend before boarding the mission ship - he’d even gotten his hands on some sort of gray paint and splattered it across his dark green suit in what was probably supposed to look like a camo pattern. Gordon thought it looked more like Jackson Pollock was having an off day.

“I _would_ be doing my tasks if _someone_ hadn’t called a meeting for the _third time today_ ,” Gordon said through gritted teeth. “What’s up this time? Did you see your own shadow and get scared it was following you?”

The rest of the crew had trooped in through various doorways by then, and Bubby cackled at the comment. “No, that was last time,” he crowed, pulling his cyan helmet off. Next to him, Dr. Coomer took off his lime green helmet with a sigh of relief. The ship was a shitty model from back before the last overhaul, so it was falling apart at the seams even before it got old, and it was ancient now. The air supply systems were so unreliable that the company had tasked the crew with staying in their suits unless they were in the conference room - they were told it was the most reinforced room in the ship. Or maybe it was the only reinforced room, being right behind the cockpit and having all the food supplies in the pantries. The rest of the ship could go to hell, apparently - as long as the engines were working, that is. And they’d been discovered to have a habit of straying out of alignment on day two of the mission, so everyone was pretty peeved about that.

Honestly, Gordon was honestly surprised the ship had held together this far. The starcutter that the company sent last time was decades younger and way more advanced, and it had still vanished with all hands before reaching its destination. In this bucket of bolts, they would be lucky to reach the Aperture asteroid field, let alone Mesa HQ itself. 

“Hi Tommy!” Joshua chirped from under the table. “Hi Sunkist!”

Tommy pulled off his bright yellow helmet and bent down to grin at Joshua as Sunkist shoved half of her incongruously enormous body under the edge of the table to reach Joshie and slather his face with kisses. Luckily he hadn’t taken his orange helmet off yet, but that just meant Gordon would have to wash it, again. He hit the clasps to unlock his own matching orange helmet, breathing in the slightly fresher air in the larger conference room space. The suits recycled air, and the packs meant they had over a day’s worth of self-contained supply, but it started to taste weird after a while. Or maybe that was the claustrophobia…

“Hey Joshua!” Tommy was saying. “Wha- what are you working on this time?”

Gordon fucking loved Tommy. He was the only one who consistently took the time to actually talk to Joshie, instead of just talking _at_ him or talking over him or, even worse, not talking to him at all. 

“Octopus!” Joshua said cheerfully, holding up the coloring book so Tommy could see the outline he was carefully filling in with green and purple. Gordon was pretty sure that no actual octopus was colored like that, but he wasn’t about to curtail his kid’s creativity. Besides, maybe it was a space octopus.

“Everyone’s here, right?” Bubby said shortly. “Let’s get this over with so we can go back to fixing this rust bucket.”

Tommy looked up in consternation. “Don’t - don’t call her that! You’re going to hurt her feelings!”

“If this ship had feelings to hurt, it would have dissolved decades ago,” Forzen growled. “Can we get down to business?”

“Yes, please,” Darnold said, stepping forward and placing his pink helmet on the table. “I was in the middle of an experiment in the medbay, and if I leave it for too long it might, well...explode.”

“Ooh, finally some quality entertainment!” Dr. Coomer said cheerfully. 

Gordon looked around. “Wait, where’s -”

“Yo,” Benrey said from directly behind him. Gordon jumped and was instantly furious at himself for doing so.

“Goddammit, Benrey, can’t you ever show up on time?” he snapped in a transparent attempt to cover his embarrassment. 

Forzen snorted. “He was here before you were, you just didn’t see him. With senses like that, you wouldn’t last a day in combat.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Gordon snapped, pointing a gloved hand at Forzen as Benrey stepped around him and flicked up the visor on his dark blue helmet. He never took the damn thing off - they had been wearing their suits during training, so Gordon was pretty sure he’d never actually seen the top of Benrey’s head. Instead the front was modified so the visor was mobile, almost like a motorcycle helmet. Gordon wasn’t sure how well it would do in a vacuum, but it must have been approved by the technicians, so he wasn’t going to worry about it. He’d rather needle Forzen, anyway. “Like _you_ know anything about combat, you wannabe bootboy -”

“Excuse me!” Darnold said loudly. “Potential explosion in Medbay if we don’t get this wrapped up in the next five minutes!”

Gordon forced himself to take a deep breath and settled back, struggling to relax his metaphorical ruffled feathers. He hated the fact that he let Forzen wind him up so easily, but the man had gotten on his nerves ever since he first saw him during training. He always wore ugly-ass camo cargo pants and never took his red beret off, even going so far as to ask the suit techs if they could make a version that he could perch on top of his helmet while he was wearing it. Luckily they had just looked at him like he was an idiot (which he was) and told him it wasn’t a good idea. Gordon was pretty sure he would have hauled off and punched Forzen by now if he had to look at that all day.

“Fine,” he said instead. “Go ahead.” And he gestured sardonically at Forzen, who visibly puffed up his chest as everyone turned to look at him.

God, he was an asshole.

“I was in Security, of course, keeping an eye on the cameras,” Forzen started, and Gordon bit his tongue to keep from snapping something about how they would be done with their daily tasks by now if Forzen didn’t insist on play-acting as a security officer - a nonexistent position that the ship didn’t even need, given the size of the crew. 

“I saw Tommy go into Medbay, and then I heard something rattling behind me. I turned around, and something was in the floor vent at the back of the room!” He finished triumphantly, looking around expectantly at the others, and Gordon fought to keep from rolling his eyes.

Bubby didn’t, and rolled his eyes magnificently. “Ugh,” he drawled, “did you actually _see_ anything this time? Because I’d be worried if the damn vents _weren’t_ rattling; it would probably mean the fucking air stopped working.”

Gordon twitched reflexively, but he knew by now that asking anyone on this ship not to swear was pointless. Joshua would pick up what he picked up, and Gordon was just going to have to make sure he knew which words he shouldn’t say in polite company. Besides, then _he_ would have to stop swearing, too, and _that_ wasn’t going to happen.

“The vents are really - they're pretty loud, Mister Forzen,” Tommy said in an apologetic tone. “Maybe it just caught you off guard?”

“I’m always on guard,” Forzen snapped at him, then glared at Bubby. “And yes, I did see something moving in there, I’m sure of it!”

“Well, what did it look like?” Dr. Coomer asked.

“Yeah, what color was it?” Bubby asked.

Forzen looked down mulishly, shuffling some of the loose reports on the table. “It was too hard to tell,” he said. “Nothing too bright - so not Tommy or Dr. Pepper or Freeman, and probably not Dr. Coomer. It could have been either of you, though,” he added, glaring between Benrey and Bubby.

Bubby snorted, and Dr. Coomer placed a hand on his arm. “I’m afraid not, in this case,” he said. “Bubby and I were in Admin, where everyone loves to swipe their card!”

“Then it was you!” Forzen said, pointing triumphantly at Benrey, who stared blankly at the finger quivering mere inches from his face. His jaw worked for a moment, then he pursed his lips and blew an obnoxiously bright blue bubble of gum that swelled so fast it almost touched Forzen’s finger before he snatched it back. Benrey let the bubblegum deflate and licked it back up, continuing to chew it with his mouth open. 

Gordon really didn’t like Benrey. But he liked Forzen even less. And the man was an idiot.

“Hey, Captain Camera,” Gordon said dryly, “can we talk about how no adult human would even be able to fit in the damn vents?”

“Hah,” Forzen said, raising his chain and staring down his nose at Gordon. “There are two issues with that statement. ‘Adult,’” and he pointed down toward where Joshua sat under the table, “and ‘human.’”

“Are you seriously saying you think I’d put my kid into the air duct system on this death trap?” Gordon snarled, both hands fisted on the table as he leaned over it to glare at Forzen with as much force as possible, nearly shaking with fury at the mere thought of it. “As if I’d even let him out of my sight -”

“I’m - I’m sure that’s not what Mister Forzen means, Mister Freeman,” Tommy interjected, “but we do - we do have to take into account the alien threat. Just, maybe not right now, if - if there’s no real evidence? Dr. Pepper’s experiment is really - it’s very time sensitive.”

“Fine,” Forzen snapped. “Just keep an eye out. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He snatched up his helmet and spun on his heel, shoving the helmet on over his beret-clad head as he stalked out of the conference room. 

Bubby snorted. “That guy’s got issues. C’mon, Harold, let’s go.” 

He and Dr. Coomer both headed back toward Admin, and Darnold strode quickly out of the cafeteria in the direction of Medbay, an intent expression on his face. Tommy started to follow him, but paused and looked over at Gordon.

“Are you, uh, okay, Mister Freeman? I’m sure Forzen is just trying to help, you know.” Gordon didn’t miss the fact that he dropped the “Mr.” in front of Forzen’s name as soon as he left the room. 

“I’m fine, Tommy, thanks,” Gordon said with a sigh, leaning both elbows on the table and dipping his head slightly to run both hands over his hair. He was going to have to redo his ponytail soon - he could feel it frizzing out and riding up the back of his neck. The techs had wanted him to cut his hair short, but he’d refused. He was starting to wonder if they hadn’t had the right idea, though. Certain areas of the ship could get _hot_. He waved a hand at Tommy. “You go on, man, I’m sure Darnold could use your help with...whatever he’s doing. Try to keep him from setting off the smoke alarm again, yeah?”

“Sure thing, Mister Freeman!” Tommy said cheerfully, and bounded after Darnold, Sunkist hot on his heels.

“Is the meeting over?” Joshua piped up from under the table. Gordon dropped into a crouch to smile at him.

“It sure is, bud. Good job keeping busy down here. How’s the octopus coming along?”

“Oh, I finished that,” Joshua said dismissively. “I’m working on a barack-uh-duh now.”

“Barracuda,” Gordon corrected the pronunciation after a quick glance at the page. Apparently barracudas were pink now. Good for them. 

That just made him think of meeting Darnold on the first day of crewmate training. He’d made some comment about his choice of the pink suit, and Darnold had looked down at it and blinked.

“Is it pink?” he’d said pensively. “I thought it was more of a lightish red.”

Gordon had hastily assured him that whatever color it was, it suited him, and Darnold had beamed at him and asked about Joshua, which automatically made him a friend in Gordon’s book. At least he liked more people on this ship than he disliked. Tommy was wonderful, of course, and Darnold was as well; Dr. Coomer was like everyone’s crazy uncle, and even Bubby was more fun than he was irritating. Forzen was a dick, though. And as for Benrey…

Wait. Where _was_ Benrey?

Gordon straightened up and looked around the cafeteria, but it was deserted. Huh, that was weird. He thought he would have heard it if Benrey left the room - even though the doors weren’t always closed to the cafeteria, the air-shields were always active, and they buzzed slightly when someone walked through them. Gordon hadn’t heard the buzz...but then again, he hadn’t been listening for it. He’d probably just missed it.

Whatever, it wasn’t like he really wanted to talk to the guy. Benrey was...weird. Gordon shrugged and popped his helmet back on, latching it closed and squatting down next to Joshua again. 

“Hey Joshie, can you save the rest of that for later? I gotta finish the wiring fix in Electrical, and then we can go to the observation deck, okay?”

“Okay!” Joshua closed his coloring book, stacking it on top of the others Gordon had stashed under the table for him, then shoved the crayons back into their battered box and scrambled out from under the table. Gordon picked him up and swung him onto his shoulders again as Joshie giggled and drummed on his helmet with his miniature gloves. 

“Hang on tight, okay?” Gordon checked to make sure Joshua had his feet tucked into the shoulder straps built into his own suit, then they were off, back down the hall to the storage room.

The conference room was quiet after they left, aside from the general noises of a working spaceship. The vibration of the engines was audible, as well as the hum of the lights and air systems, and an intermittent clanking sound inside a wall somewhere that would probably have to be dealt with soon. And, after a few minutes, there was a faint clattering sound as the floor vent at the side of the room shifted and raised slightly, balancing on a roiling dark mass of something caught halfway between liquid and smoke. It bubbled out of the vent and heaped up on the floor, rising and coalescing swiftly into a humanoid shape that brightened to a deep shade of blue.

The visored helmet turned slowly, covering the whole room in one smooth rotation. The rest of the figure was motionless - no twitching fingers, no breathing. After a few moments of stillness, the figure took one careful step forward, then another, and another, until it stood next to the table, just to the right of the position Gordon had been in during the meeting. 

It dropped into a smooth crouch with inhuman grace and stared into the space under the table where a small pile of books and writing supplies had been carefully tucked away. For a long moment, it held still - then it reached out and picked up the topmost book, letting it flop open. A purple-striped octopus was on one page, a blood-red seagull on the other. Both had been colored with dedicated enthusiasm, if not exact precision. One gloved finger traced a section of the octopus where the purple crayon had drifted beyond the dark printed lines - then the hand pulled back, snapped the book shut, and placed it carefully back on the stack, tilting it to lay in exactly the same position it had been in when Joshua left it.

One gloved hand rose to the helmet and flicked the visor back. Benrey tilted his head slightly one way, then the other, then he blinked once, twice - and it was as if a switch flipped, and he slouched and sighed, scrubbing a hand over the bridge of his nose. He stared at the books and battered box of crayons for a few moments more. But eventually he scooted back, stood up, snapped the visor back down, and walked out of the cafeteria.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crew colors:  
> Gordon & Joshua - Orange  
> Benrey - Dark Blue  
> Dr. Coomer - Lime Green  
> Bubby - Cyan  
> Darnold - Pink  
> Tommy & Sunkist - Yellow  
> Forzen - Dark Green (with his own gray-painted "camo" patterns)
> 
> I'm honestly still debating some of these, so if you have a strong opinion on why someone should be another color, let me know and it might get changed.


	2. How to Get Away with Murder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, gee, look at the time, it's time for an exposition dump! Nothing really happens this chapter except for Benrey being a creep while he's being creeped on in turn. Lots of creeping. Creeping all around. 
> 
> As always, thank you for reading, and comments are always appreciated! They'll be extra important in this story, since I'm literally making shit up as I go along, so I might miss something obvious. If something doesn't make sense, please let me know. It might be deliberately obscure for plot reasons, or I might be a forgetful dumbass! Who knows? I sure don't! This is also not beta-read, so if there's an egregious error, I'd appreciate a head's up. Thanks again!

Benrey had been as shocked as he ever allowed himself to be when he was selected as an infiltrator for such an important mission. He’d heard vague rumors among the other expats that the humans were launching ships whose routes went too close to one of the Xen portals, but hadn’t bothered paying attention. He wasn’t sure why the humans didn’t just pick another route after they lost the first ship - space was huge, and there were lots of humans - but any time he listened in on their conversations they just talked about slingshot maneuvers and lightspeed restrictions and black holes, as if any of that mattered.

Dumbass humans hadn’t even figured out faster-than-light travel yet, though, so he wasn’t sure what he’d expected.

As it was, most of the population of this planet was underground because they’d fucked up their terraforming or underestimated the radiation output of the star or something dumb like that. Benrey hadn’t paid any attention during the orientation. Maybe because there hadn’t been one, not officially - he’d showed up a decade or so ago after hitching a ride on the outside of a barrel-shaped spaceship, slithered into one of the underground facilities, and almost immediately been accosted by one of the Supervisors.

That wasn’t really their name, but what else was he supposed to call them? They supervised everything, standing around and watching while the humans ran back and forth, living their silly little lives. 

“Are you...listening, to me, Ben...ray?”

Benrey blinked and turned away from staring out at the plaza. It was one of the few places in Black Mesa that had natural light - the ceiling was a dome made of some sort of carbon-glass that was probably cutting-edge for the humans, but seemed more like shaped clay to something like Benrey. Still, the resident human population enjoyed it - they often gathered in the plaza when they had nothing else to do, sitting in groups on the carefully-curated grass lawns, purchasing food from the vendors using tokens the Mesa company paid them for working, and walking in pairs, or alone, or with smaller versions of themselves.

“Huh? Yeah,” Benrey said. He hadn’t been listening. He’d been watching one human leading one of the smaller versions around, like a mini-model with exaggerated proportions - oversized head, undersized body. In all the time he’d spent on the margins of humanity, Benrey didn’t understand their obsession with caring for their young. He barely remembered being young himself, but he was pretty sure he’d spent a lot of time hiding from adults of his species that saw youngsters as easy prey.

But humans didn’t eat their own young. They didn’t even eat _other_ humans’ young, and that just seemed like a waste of resources. He’d seen how quickly they spread from planet to planet - they could easily recoup any population losses, and they could reproduce so easily that it seemed like a ready-made food source. But somehow the idea was abhorrent to them. Maybe he should try asking one of the youngsters - but they never seemed to go anywhere without an adult, and when they got taller it was harder to tell the younger ones from the older ones.

“Then you accept...the job?”

“Whuh? What job?”

She closed her icy blue eyes and took a deep breath through her nose. The Supervisors always appeared as tall and prim and dapper, and this one was no different. Her dark hair was pulled into a severe bun at the base of her skull, and her white pantsuit was blinding in the dark hallways of Black Mesa. Benrey had crossed paths with her before, in his guise as a human security guard, but the expats typically didn’t talk to each other, most of them being fairly solitary species. He wasn’t even sure what the Supervisors looked like when they weren’t pretending to look like humans. 

“The job, Ben...ray...of sabotaging the next...human ship.” She moved her hands slowly, as if conducting her own conversation in a tightly-constrained area.

Benrey hated how she pronounced his name, but he wasn’t going to ask her to correct herself. He didn’t fancy trying to grow an entire limb back while hiding the injury from his human shift lead again. He could heal faster if he changed form, but that was...difficult, under the circumstances.

“I thought you had, uh, teams for that. Elite teams,” Benrey said instead, scratching impudently at his nose and glancing out into the plaza again. The human-and-smaller-human combo had settled onto a lawn area off by themselves, and he watched as the adult human pulled several small items from his backpack and handed them to the miniature human - to the child - who gleefully began to bounce them about in the grass. They were close enough to the observation window that Benrey could see that the objects were toys - quadruped beasts made of plastic and tiny humanoid shapes with bent legs and tall hats on their plastic heads.

“Two of our…”elite...teams”...are currently salvaging their captured...ships in...Xen.” She held out a small datacard, its surface glitching slightly as it passed from her hand to his before it stabilized. “You have been assigned a...partner to aid in...completing your...job.”

Benrey looked at the datacard for a moment before flipping it over to check the back, then turning it to the front again. He looked up at the icy blue eyes of the Supervisor. “A human?”

She smiled cooly. “We have...found that such...pairs work quite...well in deflecting suspicion from...the rest of the...human crew. Do not worry about this...one’s loyalty - he has been treated, and will be...cooperative.”

“I thought the treatment, uh, killed humans,” Benrey said uncertainly.

“It does...kill...most,” the Supervisor said, and spread her hands with another mechanical smile. “However, we are...fortunate in that there are...always more humans.”

Benrey’s attention flicked to the plaza again, where the adult human was industriously filling out paperwork balanced on his lap and the child - his child, presumably - was doing something with his long hair, its actions mostly obscured by the bulk of his shoulders.

“Yes,” the Supervisor said. “Quite.”

Benrey blinked and looked down at the datacard, at the image and specs. “This one isn’t a, uh, a mini human,” he said, waving the datacard at the Supervisor.

She actually leaned back - just a touch, but enough to give Benrey cause to smirk internally. The Supervisors still didn’t know what he was, which was fine by him, but they must have seen enough of his actions and abilities over the years to know that a single one of them didn’t stand a chance against him. He knew what they tasted like, after all, and they all knew that. But in a large enough group, they could overpower him. _He_ knew _that_ because they had, once, years ago, to inject the nanochips under his skin that somehow came back no matter how many times he tore them out, the chips that could fill his bones with excruciatingly painful electrical currents or overload his brain into a blackout state. 

Benrey and the Supervisors weren’t anything close to friends. But there were more of them than him, and they shared a home for a while, if not an origin point. It was enough to keep them on the same side - especially since the other side was full of messy, destructive, colonizing humans.

The Supervisor caught herself and straightened up minutely, brushing imaginary dust from her immaculate pantsuit. 

“No,” she said stiffly, “children are not...suited...to the treatment, and they...are not useful, to us, in most...settings. They are...supervised, as you...can see.” She gestured out the observation window. “Even on their...ships, they are...sheltered.”

“Whu - what? They take 'em on their, uh, their ships? In space?” That was surprising - Benrey knew how dangerous space was for humans. They couldn’t even survive in a vacuum, with their weird little flesh bodies and their collapsible lungs and their temperature-constrained blood vessels. Pretty poor design, on the whole.

The Supervisor wrinkled her nose delicately. “Yes, their...junior, or “mini” crewmate program is...quite prestigious, from what we...hear. They think it best, to...start them young, or so...they say.”

“Huh,” Benrey said, and watched the nearby child bounce a plastic quadruped up its parent’s arm, over his head, and down the other arm, all of which the adult appeared to ignore.

Benrey would have eaten it by now.

“Are you...hungry, Ben...ray?”

She was watching him when he turned to look at her, her head tilted slightly in a considering fashion. They probably knew every time he had to kill a human - one of the reasons he had picked a security guard position was for the opportunity to be in sparsely-populated areas of the complex at odd times. The Black Mesa facility stretched like a sandworm tunnel system beneath half the planet, and humans went missing on a weekly basis, at least. For the most part, that had nothing to do with Benrey, or with any other expats.

But his patrols had been shorter lately, and it was such a bother to properly hunt a human down instead of ambushing them at random from an assigned post. Maybe he’d been too suspicious. He didn’t need to eat very often, and he’d gotten by on surface creatures and vermin and human food before, but humans themselves were chock-full of nutritious sludge, and it had been months since he’d had one. 

He didn’t respond to the question. The Supervisor smiled slowly, then looked out at the adult human and the child. The man had pulled his glasses off to rub at his face, and the child had seized them and was holding them up to its face as it tottered around the adult, looking up at the dome and across the food court. The adult human swiped half-heartedly at it and then collapsed backward, laughing and flailing as the child belly-flopped full-force on his stomach.

They were close enough to the observation window to faintly hear the adult admonish the child with a wheezing shout of “Joshua! Don’t crush me!”

“Well,” the Supervisor said. “I am sure we can...acquire some form of...sustenance for your...long...trip.”

Benrey tilted his head, unconsciously triangulating the child’s position before he gave himself a mental shake. He must be hungrier than he thought, though he would never admit that in front of the Supervisor. As it was, there was glass in the way, so he couldn’t pounce from here - and anyway, it was broad daylight and the whole plaza was full of humans. Jumping on one right now would create chaos and jeopardize his existence, along with the existence of all the other expats currently in Black Mesa. They weren’t all like the Supervisors. Some of them could almost be considered friends.

“Yeah,” he said instead of lashing out at her, or slamming himself up against the glass, or running away. “Sure.”

“Do keep an eye on the...card, in the coming...days,” the Supervisor said. “More information will be...uploaded...for your perusal. The ship will leave...within the month.” She turned her head nearly all the way around on her neck to watch a tall human with close-cropped dark hair and a sharp blue suit striding across the plaza, briefcase in one hand and datapad in the other, speaking loudly at whoever was on the other end.

“Perhaps it is...time...for a change of...appearance,” she said. “Those shoes look...much...more comfortable.” 

Benrey didn’t watch her leave. Instead, he stared at the datacard and what little information was available about his _human partner_. The very thought made him cringe. Treated humans were only slightly more reliable than regular humans, and regular humans were completely unreliable - but it wasn’t like he had any choice in the matter. Still, if this one got in his way, he could always kill it. 

He would need to meet it first, to decide if it was even worth eating. He blinked down at the card and shook it, but it didn’t refresh. Why humans insisted on such bizarre naming fashions he had never understood, but this one was even more bizarre than normal, having only one name. And what a strange one it was... 

Benrey wasn’t even sure if it was a first name, or a last name.


	3. Suspicions and Stargazing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So remember how I said I'd decided on suit colors, but I was willing to change them if people had a good argument? A couple of folks commented and asked for Dr. Coomer to be lime green (which I had him as originally before switching him to red) because of his text color in the series, and I just...I forgot about the text colors??? Completely forgot. No idea what I was thinking. I am BooBoo the Fool, and I will be going back and changing Dr. Coomer to lime green in chapter 1. Just pretend it was like that the whole time. (But also keep in mind, suit colors may change as time goes on - with everything else going on with this ship, the issues are bound to spread to individuals' gear at some point, right...? So we'll have to see how that goes.)

The reactor meltdown warning blared out of the speakers and Gordon canceled his data upload with a snarl. They had been woken up halfway through their sleep cycle with a reactor meltdown, he had to skip out on breakfast due to a reactor meltdown, and now, mere hours into the morning, the damn thing was melting down _again_? 

“C’mon, Joshie, let’s go,” Gordon sighed and picked Joshua up off the floor. He didn’t bother to swing him up onto his shoulders - he’d been half-asleep all morning, and Gordon wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold on.

Joshua yawned and snuggled down into Gordon’s arms as he jogged out of Communications and through the storage room. Gordon kind of hated that Joshua was so used to the emergencies on this ship that he could sleep through something potentially catastrophic, but at the same time he was grateful that Joshie wasn’t scared. 

As he neared Electrical, both Dr. Coomer and Bubby trotted out. Bubby gave them a sour look, but Dr. Coomer waved as Gordon jogged up.

“Ah, hello Gordon! A lovely day for a reactor meltdown, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” Gordon panted as he fell in with them, their boots pounding on the metal flooring. “What the hell’s going on with this thing? We’ve fixed it twice already, what’s the problem?”

“Who knows, Gordon! This is an old ship! At least the reactor meltdown has an alarm - imagine if something broke down without warning us? That would be much worse!”

Gordon blanched at the thought. “Don’t say sh- stuff like that, Dr. Coomer,” he admonished, looking down at Joshua bouncing in his arms. But Joshie was still half-asleep and obviously not paying attention.

“Why did you even bring the kid?” Bubby asked. “None of this is really safe.”

Gordon wasn’t sure if he meant to the reactor room, or on the ship in general, and he didn’t really care. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t owe anyone answers for his own actions. He didn’t respond, and Bubby didn’t ask again.

They pounded into the reactor room to see Tommy bouncing on his feet, Sunkist winding between his legs.

“Oh, thank goodness!” he exclaimed as soon as he saw them, and darted for the upper monitor. Gordon paused, his arms full, as Bubby and Dr. Coomer ran to the lower monitor. Dr. Coomer smacked his hand down on the monitor, and Gordon glanced up to see Tommy with his hand down already, his monitor blue.

Dr. Coomer’s monitor was still red.

“Oh, these damnable arms!” Dr. Coomer said suddenly, pulling his hand back. “Professor Bubby, could you -”

Bubby growled and darted forward, reaching past Dr Coomer to slam his hand on the scanner. The monitor turned blue with a chime, and the alarms shut off with a strangled chirp. 

Gordon stared at Dr. Coomer, his limbs cold. “What… Dr. Coomer, what was that?” he asked, taking a step back and hefting Joshua into a more secure position.

Dr. Coomer turned to face him and held his hands out in supplication, shaking his head. “Oh, dear, this isn’t what it looks like. I’m afraid I forgot there’s a delay on my patented robo-arms! The monitors aren’t good at reading that sort of thing.”

Gordon looked around at Tommy, who also appeared unsettled. 

“Dr. Coomer, did you help with - with the reactor last night?” Tommy pressed a hand into Sunkist’s ruff as she leaned against his legs. “Or, or this morning, I guess? The really early one?”

“I’m afraid not,” Dr. Coomer said, frowning pensively. “Now, I can see how this looks bad, but I can assure you that I have indeed helped with a reactor meltdown before. Why, just two days ago -”

“But how do we know that was you?” Gordon interrupted, hitching his sleepy son up higher in his arms in the hope that Joshie wouldn’t be able to feel his pounding heart. “You could have been replaced, or, or possessed, or -”

“They’re supposed to be _aliens_ ,” Bubby snapped, “not fucking _demons_. And there’s no proof of any sort of replacement, just that hysterical woman from the last ship who made all the paranoid recordings.”

“Those _paranoid recordings_ are the only reason we even know what _happened_ to the last ship,” Gordon snarled quietly, taking another step back toward the doorway as Bubby stepped in front of Dr. Coomer, who was wringing his hands fretfully.

“Look, just - Dr. Coomer, I’m sorry, but could you try now? Please?” Gordon really, really wanted to be wrong about this.

Dr. Coomer nodded decisively. “Of course, Gordon!” He turned his back on the others and pressed his left hand down on the palm reader. The monitor remained red for two heartbeats, three, four - then it flashed blue and held. Dr. Coomer removed his left hand and placed his right hand down. Again, there was a delay, but the monitor turned blue.

Bubby kept his back to Dr. Coomer the whole time, arms crossed and slouching as he glared between Gordon and Tommy. Gordon sagged in relief when the monitor turned blue the first time, but continued watching until Dr. Coomer had tested both hands.

“There we are!” Dr. Coomer said cheerfully, turning back around and beaming at Gordon and Tommy. “Right as rain! There’s just a bit of a delay, and since speed is of the essence, I didn’t want to waste time when dear Professor Bubby was right here!”

“Doctor,” Bubby growled, then directed his glare at Gordon. “Happy now?”

“Thrilled,” Gordon said wearily as he leaned his shoulder against the doorjam. “Sorry, Dr. Coomer, I guess I’m the paranoid one now.”

“Not to worry, Gordon! It’s only paranoia if they aren’t out to get you, and two missing ships prove that someone is, indeed, trying to ‘get’ us.” Dr. Coomer did air quotes with his fingers around ‘get,’ then continued, “Such precautions are only smart!”

“Oh, not this again,” Bubby muttered. “I still think the damn ships got sucked into a black hole or mutinied or something.” 

“But the, the last ship said it was aliens for sure,” Tommy said.

“It’s _never_ aliens,” Bubby said flatly. “It’s always something else. If there were aliens around, they wouldn’t be wasting time on _us_. C’mon, Harold, let’s go.”

Dr. Coomer trotted after Bubby as he stalked past Gordon and waved cheerily at Joshua as he passed. A barely-awake Joshua waved blearily back, then smacked his hand against his helmet trying to cover a yawn.

Gordon shifted Joshua in his arms and took a few steps into the reactor room so he could see the upper monitor station, then glanced over at Tommy. “Are we...are we good here? Do we need to start it up again or anything?”

Tommy shook his head inside his helmet. “No, it was just - it just needed an acknowledgement, Mr. Freeman. I don’t know why, though. It shouldn’t need this much feedback from us, it should just...work.”

Gordon sighed heavily and leaned back against the wall, his air pack clunking as it hit the metal. “Yeah, well, a lot of shit’s supposed to just work on this ship that doesn’t. It almost makes me wonder…” He glanced down at Joshua and trailed off. He didn’t want to think about that theory, about how things were starting to feel unsustainable, about how he’d begun to wonder whether they were even supposed to reach their destination, or whether they had been cast out into the dark as some sort of bait so the company could catch the saboteurs in the act.

But if that were true, then he had put both himself and his child in the role of sacrificial lambs, and that was unacceptable. There had to be something else going on. Maybe a tech forgot to tighten a bolt during the final checkup and it was resulting in a cascade of issues. Gordon used to have a hoverbike that would never run worse than right after it came back from the shop - but after a week or so of riding, it would straighten out and run normally again. They had been on the ship for nearly a week, so maybe things were just about to get better.

“Wonder what, Mr. Freeman?”

Gordon looked over at Tommy, who stood tall in his yellow suit, one hand still buried in his enormous dog’s fur. 

“Never mind,” he sighed. “I need to get back to...whatever I was doing. What was I doing?” He looked down at Joshua, but he’d fallen asleep against Gordon’s chest, his face smushed against the inside of his visor. Gordon couldn’t help but smile a little at the sight - at least one of them was getting some rest. He shifted Joshie enough to see the panel on his right arm that showed his daily tasks, which the ship’s computer generated each morning after running a diagnostic to see what had broken during the down shift.

Gordon squinted at the text. “Oh, right, data upload.” He looked up at Tommy. “Where are you headed?”

Tommy shrugged. “I guess I- I’d better go check on Darnold. He was doing something with - with samples, but I think he switched languages in the middle or something, because I couldn’t really understand...”

Gordon chuckled and stepped away from the wall, the air vent under his boots rattling as he took his weight off it. “C’mon, Tommy, you’re a smart guy, you’ll figure it out. I’ll go with you - I think it’s about the same distance to get back to Admin.”

As they headed out into the hallway toward the upper engine, Gordon glanced idly into Security and was mildly surprised not to see Forzen hunched over the desk inside. Maybe he was at the computer bank, watching the cameras like a creep. Or maybe, just maybe, he was actually doing his tasks - though that one seemed unlikely.

“Are you sure she doesn’t need a helmet or a suit or anything?” Gordon asked, nodding down at Sunkist as they crossed into the engine room.

“No, Mr. Freeman,” Tommy laughed. “I keep telling you, Sunkist is the perfect dog!”

“I know, I know,” Gordon chuckled, “but I’m just saying, I’m not sure how -”

He only glanced back for a second - something that was becoming second nature by now after all the debriefings they got about the contents of the previous ship’s last transmissions. It made everyone jumpy, but the company said that was for the best - they wanted them all on their toes. They claimed it was because they didn’t want to lose another crew, another ship, but after seeing how cruddy this ship was, Gordon wasn’t so sure that was really their goal.

But they _had_ succeeded in making them all paranoid, so he kept checking his back. It wasn’t just him, after all - he was watching over Joshua, too.

That was the only reason he saw Forzen in the hallway outside Security. That in itself wasn’t strange - the man practically lived in the Security room, except for darting around and doing his tasks when the others were mostly grouped in one area, like during mealtimes. But what was strange was the direction he was moving.

“Tommy -” Gordon froze, half-twisted around, peering around the edge of his helmet. “Did you see that?”

“S-see what, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy’s footsteps came back toward him, which meant he must have been around the corner already. Damn.

“Forzen just walked out of the reactor room,” Gordon said quietly. “He went into Security.”

He glanced up at Tommy, who had a look of consternation on his face. “But -” Tommy said. “But we were - we were just _in_ the reactor room.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said heavily, turning to look back down the hall. “Yeah, we were.”

They were both silent for a moment. 

“What - what should we do?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t know,” Gordon replied. “I don’t know what the right thing is anymore. He’s so fucking volatile that if I call a meeting and accuse him of anything, he’ll probably just jump over the table and try to beat me to death with my own helmet.”

Tommy giggled as Gordon blanched and quickly checked to make sure Joshua was still asleep. He appeared to be, if the dribble of drool on the inside of his helmet was any indication. That was gross, but it was very low on the list of gross things involved in having a kid. 

“We could go talk to him?” Tommy said in a tone of voice that suggested he did not want to do that.

“I don’t have the energy for that right now,” Gordon said wearily. “And after Dr. Coomer - I’m afraid I’m being too paranoid. Maybe...maybe he just went in there really quick and turned right back around or something.”

“Yeah...” Tommy said slowly. “Maybe.”

“Look, let’s just…” Gordon hefted Joshua up a little, and Joshie snuffled and readjusted. “Let’s just keep this in mind. I don’t...ugh, I don’t think it’s worth calling a meeting over. But the next time he tries to claim I stuck my kid in a vent just to creep him out I’ll drop this on him and see if he can wriggle his way out of it.”

Mind made up, he stepped past Tommy and started walking toward Medical. After a moment, Sunkist trotted past him, her flank brushing against his hip. She really was a colossal dog.

Gordon left Tommy chatting with a distracted Darnold in Medical and headed down to finish his data download and card swipe one-handed. Joshie was really getting too big to be carried around like this, but the older he got, the closer Gordon wanted to hold him. Plus he just felt better when Joshie was in his arms or on his shoulders. After everything, he’d rather keep his kid close.

And so when Joshua yawned awake twenty minutes later, it was to the sight of an endless starfield. Gordon had settled both of them in one of the giant squishy chairs on the dim observation deck, and when Joshie woke up and saw where they were, he just wiggled himself around to sit properly on Gordon’s lap and stare out the window. One of the planet’s moons was visible, a lonely crescent way out in the black with a background of scattered stars. The observation deck was always kept pretty dark (enough that Gordon had checked every corner before sitting down), but even in the dim light, it took a while for his eyes to adjust.

“Izzat a shoo’ing star?” Joshie slurred, pointing vaguely out the window, obviously still half-asleep.

Gordon looked up and blinked at the bright jet of light that ended in a pinprick so bright he had to look away. 

“Nah, buddy, that’s a ship,” he said, reaching down to cover Joshua’s eyes. “Don’t look right at it - looks like it’s headed for the moon, the burners are pointed right at us.”

“What’s it doin’ on th’ moon?” Joshua asked.

“Mmm,” Gordon hummed for a moment as he rocked Joshie subconsciously from side to side. “Probably mining. I think that’s Alpha Moon - Moon 2 is the one that’s got a resort on it, and we’d probably be able to see the lights on the dark side from here. So that’s probably a mining ship going in to collect...something.”

“I wanna go t’ Moon 2,” Joshua mumbled.

“Everyone wants to go to Moon 2, it’s like Space Vegas,” Gordon said.

“What’s Space Vegas?”

“Uh…” Gordon had to think for a minute. “Vegas was on Earth, and it was a whole city that just partied and played all the time.”

Josh perked up. “Birthday parties?”

“Well, maybe. But mostly gambling and casinos, I think. That kind of thing.”

“Oh.” Joshua slumped back against Gordon’s chest. “Boring grown-up parties.”

“Hey,” Gordon said mildly, then his brain caught up. “Hey, wait, hang on, who’s been gambling around you?”

“Dr. Coomer an’ Mr. Bubby. Mr. Bubby said he’d teach me to count cards,” Joshua yawned. “But I can already count, so that sounds boring.”

“Yeah, buddy, it’s really boring,” Gordon said, fuming quietly. “Really... super boring.” He’d have to make sure not to leave Joshua alone at Dr. Coomer’s table at mealtimes. He’d assumed the older scientist would be a good chaperone, but maybe he should revise that opinion.

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, watching the stars shift slightly as the ship turned. Gordon was starting to see the faint, cloudy outline of a nearby spiral galaxy when he heard shifting fabric and turned to look toward the door.

He saw a dark spacesuit, and for a moment his breath caught, but then he realized it wasn’t Forzen and he relaxed a little. He wasn’t keen on Benrey either, but still.

“Hey,” Benrey said flatly. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Tasks’re done,” Gordon said as he looked back out the observation window, keeping his head turned just enough to see Benrey out of the corner of his visor. “We’re stargazing.”

“Huh,” Benrey said. “Can I help?”

“It’s not - it’s not a task, man,” Gordon said. “If you want to look at stars, sit down and look at stars. It’s silent stargazing time.”

“Cool.”

Gordon felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck as Benrey walked behind him. He couldn’t keep him in his vision all the way, so he settled for swiveling his head quickly to catch Benrey on the other side of his visor. Benrey didn’t seem to notice as he settled into the other big squishy chair several feet away and stared straight ahead out the observation window, back ramrod straight.

After a few moments, Gordon sighed. “Would you relax, man? You’re hurting _my_ back.”

Benrey blinked and stared at him, his eyes reflecting the starlight strangely. “Whuh?”

Gordon jerked his head at the chair. “Lean back. That’s the point of these chairs - they’re so soft, they swallow up the oxygen packs so you can relax.”

Benrey snorted. “That sounds dumb, bro. Chairs don’t eat things.”

“It’s- it’s a figure of speech, you don’t -” Gordon stopped and took a breath as Joshie wiggled and mumbled something in his lap. “Forget it. Be uncomfortable. Whatever.”

Joshua tapped his arm and pointed out a handful of stars that looked like a sailboat, and Gordon agreed. They wouldn’t look like a sailboat in two weeks’ time when the ship had moved that much further, but by then surely they would look like some other vehicle or animal.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Benrey lean back slowly and look a little surprised when the chair cushions gave way to the pack, cradling his shoulders and allowing him to slouch back the same way Gordon was.

“Hey, bro, do you -”

“Shhh!” Joshua shushed Benrey, who twitched and stared at him, then Gordon, then Josh again as he imperiously said, “It’s silent stargazing time.”

“Uh…” Benrey looked completely bewildered.

“Nope, you heard him,” Gordon said, fighting to keep the grin off his face. “Silent stargazing time. That means no talking.”

“Whuh -”

“Shh!” Both Gordon and Joshua shushed him that time, and he jerked back, muttering something to himself before settling lower into the squishy chair.

And, amazingly, he respected silent stargazing time for the next fifteen minutes, even as Joshua and Gordon murmured to each other about current constellations. Talking about stars during silent stargazing time was, of course, allowed, but if Benrey couldn’t figure that out that was his problem. Instead he sat slouched back in the cushy chair and stared out into the black, starlight in his eyes and an odd, faraway look on his face. And when Joshie finally got bored and kicked his way off Gordon’s lap, Benrey didn’t seem to notice. He continued to gaze blankly out into space as Gordon and Joshua walked quietly out of the observation deck, as if he were looking for something that really should have been there, but was somehow gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come yell at me on Tumblr @antilocaprine


	4. Catch and Release

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Bubby time! ...Apparently this version of Bubby is a tortured romantic. I keep making things more complex for myself - I have a whole timeline drawn out on little scraps of post-it notes on my whiteboard. I look like a crazy person, like I've got my own Pepe Silvia mystery. Except I'm building the whole thing myself, so all the problems I have to solve are ones I've made for myself. Ah, writing. Such a simple pleasure...

The first time Bubby woke up, there was a tube in his throat.

His first thought was some garbled version of ‘ _what the fuck?_ ’

His second thought was, ‘ _oh no, not this fucking bullshit again._ ’

It took a long moment, but with some struggling he was able to open his eyes. They immediately filled with fluid - thicker than water, thinner than jelly - but after blinking thickly, he could see through it to some degree.

Not that there was much to see - he was in some sort of tube, and while he was familiar with that, it had been such a long time that he’d forgotten how much it sucked. This was a different kind of tube, though - the substance he was suspended in was thicker, and more of a teal than the bright green liquid he grew up in (or was built in or whatever) so many years ago.

There were figures moving around outside the tube, but they were heavily distorted by the goop or the glass or both. Bubby squinted and figured there were between two and five people in the room. Maybe six - but the sixth shape hadn’t moved, so it might also be some sort of console or, hell, maybe a coat rack. Bubby’s eyes weren’t great at the best of times, and this was a flat-out terrible time, so that was probably the best he was going to get as far as visuals went. Two to five people, but maybe six. Who knows. Who cares.

He twitched his cheeks to feel the edges of the mask over his nose and mouth, and tried to avoid thinking about the uncomfortable length of tubing holding his throat open. He tried to take a deep breath in - and felt the chemical hit settle in the bottom of his lungs, dragging him back down into the dark.

___________________ 

The second time Bubby woke up, he wasn’t sure he was awake. He was on his back on what felt like a slab of ice, with a series of bright lights overhead that shifted and rotated like a dentist’s array. Everything felt distinctly surgical, and Bubby felt his body shiver involuntarily. The thing he was laying on rattled, and the lights overhead swung sideways, partially eclipsed by a dark shadowy figure. Either its limbs and skull were bizarrely elongated, or Bubby’s eyes were in even worse shape than normal.

The damn tube was still in his throat. And to make matters worse, he was pretty sure there was a tube in at least one of his nostrils, if not both. He tried to move his head and thumped his temple against something hard and cold and raised, with very little give to it.

The shadowed shape said something that was muddled by the tube fluid leaking out of Bubby’s ears, and made a motion across his body. He tried to turn his head the other way to see what it had gestured at, but there was something obstructing his movement in that direction, too, and it tightened in to press his head back so he was facing straight up again. 

Clamps. His head was clamped in place. Historically, that was never good.

Weakly, he tried to move his arms, then his legs, and realized with growing horror that he was so tightly secured to the icy surface that he couldn’t even bend his knees or elbows. And speaking of elbows, something gripped his right arm with chilly precision and stabbed him with a needle. He twitched and tried to open his mouth, but another elongated, shadowy shape was placing a mask over his lower face, and he could hear the gas hissing. With his head stuck in place, he couldn’t even try to avoid it.

The bright lights faded, along with the jumbled voices, as Bubby went under again.

___________________ 

The third time Bubby woke up, he was in too much pain to register anything other than the desire to scream a lot and then stop being awake. So he did both. Probably even in that order. 

___________________ 

He lost track for some time, and then there was a long stretch of time where he felt utterly disconnected from himself, even though he was awake. There were instructions - he had to do something, though he could never hold the objective in his mind when he concentrated on its specifics - and there was some kind of debriefing, and talk of a partner, and a ship, and a job.

And here’s the thing. Bubby had a job. It was a semi-dead-end research and experimentation position in the depths of the Black Mesa labs, but at least he wasn’t the one being experimented on, so he saw that as a win. There had been a time when he thought he could have more, but...something had happened, and that door had closed. Forever. So he could be content, if not happy, and do his job, and someday, maybe, he would board the underground train to a different sector of the underground facility, somewhere on the other side of the planet, and knock on that closed door in the hopes that the right person answered.

But there was something that compelled him to go along with this job. He couldn’t really focus on it, but he had experience with scientists messing around in his brain, and knew that if he could just get the right angle he could catch enough snippets of thoughts that eventually, he’d be able to form an idea of the big picture. 

Then he saw the ship’s proposed manifest, and the big picture didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but one name. He could almost hear the creak of that door opening - unoiled hinges, rusted locks, he’d never maintained the things that mattered - and, yes, okay, all right, _fine_. Fine. He wouldn’t fight the compulsion this time, not if it would get him onto that ship, with that name. With that person. He would figure the rest of it out later. The disassociation, the disconnection, the memory gaps and compulsive actions and the phantom feeling of a tube in the back of his throat - none of that mattered if he could somehow manage to shoulder that door open and try again to fit himself on the other side.

It took a week for the paperwork and application data to go through, and Bubby spent it in a haze of assessments by dull-eyed technicians in the transit prep center. Somewhere in the adjoining rooms were a handful of other people undergoing the same inspections, the same dry questionnaires, the same holding pattern waiting game, but only one of them mattered.

And then the training module was approved, and Bubby blinked back into himself as a blank-faced technician tightened a strap on the harness of his cyan space suit, and Bubby realized this was it, this was the day he would find out if there was any possibility that the door could be opened. He’d settle for anything - a crack big enough to pass notes, just enough to peer through and catch of glimpse of the other side, at what might have been if he hadn’t been so stubborn or stupid or angry or _himself_.

Surely, there was a chance.

He thought he was the only person in the training lobby at first. One of the blank-faced techs escorted him to the doorway and gestured for him to go inside. 

“Remember your objective,” she said in a monotone voice. “Keep an eye on the time.” Then she turned robotically and marched back down the hall as the door swung slowly closed.

Bubby stared after her, then shook his head and looked around. The lobby itself was fairly bare, with some benches, a raised table, and a handful of screen stations around the room. The whole room was awkwardly shaped, with more seating and screen stations around a corner. Bubby walked slowly over to the central table, which was projecting ten holographic squares above its surface. Bubby did a measured circuit of the round table, glaring at each portrait as it came into view. One square was empty and blacked out. One square was, of course, Bubby himself. The others were an eclectic mix of individuals, including what appeared to be a young child and - was that a _dog_? What the fuck?

But then, ah, there, next to the portrait of the golden retriever - there he was. The whole reason Bubby was here. His whole reason for being, maybe - the reason he was out of his tube, anyway. The original tube, not the - the other - the...something. Bubby felt his thoughts slip away and let them go. This was more important.

He reached out gingerly and rested the fingertips of his gloves against the edge of the portrait. The image fizzed and glitched at the contact, and he snatched his hand back with a huff.

“You gotta touch the pad,” a low voice said, as monotone as the robotic blank-faced technicians, and Bubby flinched and snapped his head up, helmet still clenched in his free hand. 

There was a person in a dark blue space suit sitting on a counter against the far wall. His helmet had a visor like a motorcycle helmet, which he had flipped up, and he was swinging his feet idly as he watched Bubby with unblinking eyes that looked weirdly flat in the lobby’s lighting. 

“Who the fuck are you?” Bubby snapped, setting his hip against the table and angling his shoulders into a defensive hunch before he realized what he was doing. For fuck’s sake, he was feeling protective over a fucking _picture_ \- what was he going to do when he saw the real thing?

“Mmm...Benrey.” 

“Benrey? What the fuck kind of name is Benrey?”

Benrey shrugged, picked something up off the counter next to him, and flicked it across the room. Bubby caught it reflexively and stared down at a datacard that bore an image of his own face.

“I dunno,” Benrey said. “What th’fuck kinda name is Bubby?”

Bubby blinked at the datacard, staring at the words almost without seeing them. This was...it was everything. His personal data code, his height, weight, donor info, and keywords like “relevant personality traits” and “weaknesses” and “upkeep” and “treated.” What the _fuck_.

“What the fuck is this?” Bubby snapped, but when he looked up, Benrey was gone. He jerked his head around, and there he was on the other side of the table, one hand down on the scanner pad below one of the holographic portraits - Bubby couldn’t see it from the back, but he was pretty sure it was next to the blanked-out space. The scanner blinked green and beeped, and the portrait hovering over it shrank to a line, then sprang back as a cheery blue checkmark, hovering in 3D.

“Just a card, bro, chill,” Benrey said, and the datacard whipped out of Bubby’s fingers. He wasted a moment looking down at his empty hand like an idiot, so when he looked back up at Benrey he just saw him tucking the datacard away into his suit, instead of seeing how he’d gotten it out of Bubby’s hands from eight feet away. 

“Where did you get that?” Bubby asked as he straightened up.

Benrey made eye contact with him and sighed. “Look, let’s just uh, get this over with.” Then he blinked slowly and his eyes went red - or yellow - or reflective - or - something - something was wrong - something was -

“Got it?” Benrey asked.

Bubby felt his whole body twitch like a hypnagogic jerk and snapped back into himself. He’d been drifting again. Hopefully Benrey hadn’t said anything important.

“Ugh, useless. Just, uh, scan yourself in or whatever.” Benrey waved a hand and wandered away across the room, boosting himself back up on the countertop and kicking his feet. After a moment, without looking, he reached out and turned on the sink next to him, letting the water run down the drain. His other hand fidgeted, then reached out and batted a stack of plastic cups off the counter, sending them bouncing and scattering across the floor.

Bubby hadn’t signed up for...whatever the hell that was. He turned his back on Benrey and took two steps around the table to put his own hand down below his portrait. He idly noted it was the same picture as...something. The scanner beeped, and the image dropped into a horizontal line, then sprang up into a boxy cyan checkmark. Now there were two weird 3D checkmarks in suit colors, as well as eight square flat images, one of which was of a dog. Bubby really hoped someone was going to explain the dog. 

And the kid, for that matter. Because who in their right mind would take a kid with them on a spaceship that was only being sent out because the first two ships and their crews vanished with nearly no trace?

His answer came a moment later when two orange-suited figures came barreling through the lobby doors. Well, the smaller orange-suited figure barreled through - the larger orange-suited figure followed at a more sedate pace, though that might have been due to exhaustion.

So Bubby met Gordon and Joshua Freeman, and then he met Tommy Coolatta and Sunkist, which no one explained, and then he met Darnold Pepper, and by that time he was able to work his way around the room to an isolated bench near the door. From there he could keep an eye on Benrey, who was still on the counter, and the group around the table, which now had a handful of other bright and cheery checkmarks hovering over it in primary suit colors. Joshua’s checkmark was half as big as the others, but Sunkist the dog’s checkmark was just as big as Tommy’s. Maybe it was a size thing. She _was_ an enormous dog - maybe some sort of a mix?

And then, oh, and then, the lobby door opened, and there he was. Lime green spacesuit, of course, and flyaway white hair over that magnificent moustache, and he looked the same - a little older, yes, slightly deeper wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, but the same eyes, the same smile, the same face that Bubby remembered encouraging him kindly through the glass of his tube so long ago.

Bubby had to swallow thickly before he could speak. This was it, wasn’t it? The moment of truth, the moment when he finds out if that door he’d thought closed forever could ever be opened again. He had to try.

Bubby stood up. “...Harold?”

Dr. Harold Coomer turned to look at him and froze, and for a split second, Bubby thought that was that. He was pretty sure he could pull out of the crew at this point - the training module was a week long, they could surely find someone else to take his place - and then the breath was knocked out of his lungs as Dr. Coomer launched himself at Bubby and wrapped his arms around him.

That was the same, too - the same bone-crushing style of hug that Dr. Coomer always gave, just this side of too tight, always conscious of how much pressure he could exert with his overpowered arms. 

Oh shit, he was talking. Bubby struggled to rein himself in and focus, bringing his own arms up to clasp Dr. Coomer’s back as Coomer laughed into the embrace.

“Oh Professor Bubby,” he was saying, “I thought I’d never see you again! What luck this is! Oh, we’ll have so much time to catch up!” He pulled back and beamed up at Bubby, who stared down at him as he bent to scoop his helmet off the floor - he must have dropped it in his haste to hug Bubby.

And just like that, Bubby saw the door that he’d thought was closed for good was mounted in a doorframe with no wall. He’d been standing so close to it for so many years that he hadn’t seen it was a barrier of his own making - all he had to do was take a step back and walk around the freestanding frame to wander right back into Dr. Coomer’s life. All he had to do was step back...look at the big picture...of...something…

“Let me just sign in and we’ll sit down and have a chat,” Dr. Coomer said as he trotted toward the table. “Oh, Professor, I have so much to tell you!”

Bubby blinked, and one corner of his mouth curled up. He remembered this part, this call and response of teasing conflict. “It’s Doctor,” he said as he started after Dr. Coomer. “Not Professor. Doctor.”

“Of course, Professor!” Dr. Coomer beamed back at him, and Bubby felt his life rustle itself together like iron filings, lining up on a trajectory that ran parallel to Dr. Coomer’s course. For as long as Bubby could, he would keep pace with him.

As a lime green checkmark sprang into being above the table that was surrounded by a cacophony of voices - some idiot with a beret was there, too, now, and the kid was rolling around on the floor with the dog - something made Bubby look toward the side alcove where Benrey was still sitting. Benrey's look had changed - he wasn’t lounging anymore. Instead, he sat perfectly still, ankles together, visor closed over his face, hands clasped on his lap as he gazed at the collection of people in the room. When his eyes reached Bubby, he winked, then flicked his gaze over to Coomer. Unblinking, he tilted his head slowly one way, then another, like a dog trying to tell where a noise was coming from so it could pounce.

Bubby stepped around Coomer and glared daggers at Benrey, who blinked sharply, then looked up at Bubby and winked again - as if they were in on some sort of conspiracy or something - before reaching up to flick the visor open again and sliding off the countertop to wander around the table with a boorish shout of “TOMMY!” 

“Bubby? Let’s go sit down. It’s been far too long, you know!” Dr. Coomer reached out and grabbed Bubby’s arm, towing him toward a pair of chairs and beaming up at him as if the last few years hadn’t happened - as if their last conversations hadn’t happened. And maybe that was all it took - skip over the bad parts, start over, try again. Bubby could handle that.

“Now,” Dr. Coomer said as they settled into the chairs, “tell me _everything_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come shout at me to write faster on Tumblr @antilocaprine


	5. Sun Cycles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter probably has the most uses of the word "Dad" in it, because it's mostly Joshua yelling at Gordon. But in his defense, how else is he supposed to get his attention? He is very small on a very big, poorly-maintained ship, so you can imagine the kind of stress he is under.

“...ad? ...Dad? ...Dad?”

For a moment, Gordon wasn’t sure what woke him up as he blinked groggily at the ceiling. Then his brain kickstarted and he inhaled sharply as Joshua called him again in a thin and shaky voice.

“Dad?”

“Whassup, buttercup?” Gordon slurred, rolling over to squint across the room. The crew quarters were set up in a similar fashion to dorm rooms, and Joshua’s bed was against the opposite wall. Due to space constraints on the ship, the opposite wall wasn’t very far away, but it was far enough that Gordon would have to get up and take a step to reach Joshua’s bed. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to do that tonight - the air in the crew quarters was kept cold to conserve power, and he was very warm and cozy under his blankets.

Joshua was silent for a moment, then he whispered “I had a bad dream.”

Well, fuck. So much for staying warm and cozy.

Gordon rolled over and heaved himself off the bed, making a last-minute decision and dragging the top blanket with him as he stepped briefly onto the floor before swiveling around and sitting on the edge of Joshua’s bed. They had wound string lights around the walls on their first day on the ship in an effort to make the room a little more homey, and they were just bright enough to highlight the wetness in Joshua’s eyes as he peered up at Gordon.

“C’mere, bud.” Gordon opened his arms and started to lean down, but Joshie scrambled out from under his blanket and into Gordon’s, collapsing half onto his lap.

“Oof, hey, it’s okay,” Gordon said reassuringly, wrapping his arms around Joshie and squeezing. “It was just a dream, it’s not real, it’s okay.” 

“I _know_ ,” Joshua mumbled into his stomach, “but it _could_ be real.”

Gordon rubbed his back and thought for a moment. This was the hardest part of being a parent, for him, especially a single parent. What were you supposed to do when your kid was scared of something you couldn’t fight? How could you reassure them that their nightmares wouldn’t come true?

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

Joshua shrugged against his side and kept his face buried against Gordon’s stomach. Gordon shifted the blanket higher over his shoulders so he could completely envelop Joshua in its warmth and scooted back a bit to lean against the wall.

“You don’t have to,” he continued after a moment. “It might make you feel better to talk it out, but it might not if you don’t want to think about it. Either way, I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.” He swallowed thickly and took a slow, deep breath, trying to keep Joshua calm by being calm himself. 

He wished he was better at this.

Something in the walls rattled quietly, and Joshua tightened his grip minutely. Gordon frowned at the opposite wall, then looked down at Joshua’s curly hair.

“Are you worried about the ship?”

Joshie nodded against his stomach.

Well, shit. How was Gordon supposed to argue the stability of the ship when he himself was concerned about that very thing?

“Well,” he said slowly, “what exactly are you worried about?” Maybe it would be something easy.

“What if the ship stops working?” Joshua asked quietly.

Okay, not really easy. Too broad to have a simple answer.

“The ship won’t stop working,” Gordon started slowly, thinking fast. “Even if the engines stop, we’re still moving, and the life support systems have enough backups that even if one breaks, there are others that won’t break.” Probably. “And we’re in a major shipping lane, so it wouldn’t be long before someone could reach us if we had to call for help.” For now - they’d be veering out of the shipping lane soon, since that was the whole point of the mission. “Plus, even if lots of stuff breaks, the cafeteria is its own pod, and we can all hang out there and play games until we get picked up. There’s lots of food and a console and everything in there.” Not that any of that would be enough if the rest of the ship was dead for more than a few days…

“But what if we get stuck outside the ship?” Joshie mumbled.

Gordon blinked. “Outside the ship? There’s no reason to go outside the ship.”

“But what if we _do_?” Joshie asked insistently, still keeping his face hidden.

“We won’t,” Gordon said decisively. “But, if we do, we’ll be in our suits, and they have enough air for a long time, so the crew would have time to get us back in.” He ran a hand through Joshua’s curly hair. “Is this just from a bad dream, or has someone been telling you the ship isn’t safe?”

Joshua shrugged. “Mr. Bubby ‘n’ Dr. Coomer were talking n’then Mr. Forzen said they were right n’the whole ship was gonna fall apart before we got anywhere n’then Mr. Bubby said the reason stuff keeps breaking’s because someone on the ship is a bad guy, and he said as soon as he knows who it is he’ll shoot them into space, n’then Mr. Forzen got all weird n’said something mean n’then Mr. Bubby said something even meaner and then -”

“Okay, stop, hang on,” Gordon said, quietly furious. “Where were you when this was going on? Where was I?”

Joshua’s shoulders hunched a little, and Gordon rubbed at his back again. “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said, “I’m not mad at you. I just don’t want you hearing stuff that scares you.”

“You were cleaning the oh-two filter, and I went into the hall cause I could hear voices. Dr. Coomer was shooting asteroids, n’last time he said I could help next time, but there were other people there so I didn’t wanna ask.”

“Okay, that’s fine, that’s good. I’ll make sure you get to do that soon. But, Joshie,” Gordon continued, “the last time I cleaned the oxygen filter was two days ago. Was that when you heard this?”

Joshua nodded.

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“It wasn’t scary before I had the bad dream,” Joshua mumbled into Gordon’s shirt.

“Okay,” Gordon said, and rubbed his back some more for lack of a better response. “That’s okay. I’m sorry it upset you, and I wish you told me when it happened.”

“You were busy,” Joshua said, and Gordon’s heart broke a little.

“Joshua,” he said firmly, “I am _never_ too busy for you. Never. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

Joshua sniffled and squeezed him tighter, rubbing his face against Gordon’s side and, by the feel of it, smearing snot on Gordon’s shirt. That was fine. He could deal with that.

“Can I sleep in your bed?” Joshua whispered.

Gordon squinted at the spacesuit draped over the dresser at the end of his bed. They were supposed to hang the suits in the in-wall closets, but he didn’t trust that the doors would reliably open in an emergency, so he kept their suits out and used the closets for storage space.

It was easy to see where Joshua got his paranoia from.

Leaving the suits out provided another service, which was the screens on the forearms that could be programmed to display different things, including daily tasks, emergency countdowns, and a simple clock interface. Gordon always set the arm of his suit to a clock in the evenings and faced it toward Joshua’s bed, so if Joshie woke up in the night he would know what time it was and whether or not it was close enough to breakfast time to wake Gordon by belly-flopping onto his bed.

The clock said 04:19 - too early to get up, but late enough that Gordon might not fall asleep again.

“Tell you what,” he said instead, “how about this time, we share your bed? Then we don’t have to move.”

“Okay,” Joshua said, and wriggled back under his own covers. Gordon stayed on top of the sheets, but curled onto his side and wrapped his blanket more tightly around himself as Joshua settled in. 

They lay quietly for a moment, then Joshua whispered “Dad?”

“Hm?” Gordon responded.

“Can you tell me a story?”

“Hmmm...sure thing, buddy,” Gordon said, and then wracked his brain for something that had nothing at all to do with spaceships or death or disasters. He ended up settling on a story he’d told Joshua before, about an experiment of Tommy’s that had gone wrong when they were scientists at Black Mesa studying atmospheric compounds in an ongoing and planetwide effort to fix the botched terraforming that the original settlers had done to the surface. Tommy got distracted talking about a new scientist who had just started in a different department (which Gordon found out was Darnold when Tommy saw him in the lobby of the training room and looked like all his dreams had come true), and added a one-liter flask of helium instead of a one-milliliter measure. 

It was enough of a difference that Gordon and Tommy talked like cartoon characters for the rest of the day. Even Dr. Coomer got looped in when he came into their lab to find out why Gordon hadn’t responded to an important email, only to find both Gordon and Tommy rolling on the ground in high-pitched hysterics. They’d been too slow to tell Dr. Coomer to stay away from the air shield, and he’d stepped into the contaminated zone before they could gather the breath to stop him. As soon as he realized what was going on, he insisted on joining them until the gas was vented and its effects wore off. The three of them told increasingly raunchy stories in their cartoon character voices and laughed more than Gordon had for months before or after.

He didn’t tell all these details to Joshua, but he tried to impart the camaraderie, and the intelligence and kindness of the other two scientists that Gordon had worked with planetside. He wanted Joshua to feel safe more than anything, and he hoped this would help him understand that he wasn’t alone on the ship, even if Gordon was distracted or stressed by the constant ongoing issues. And as he talked in a low, soft voice, he reminded himself to pay more attention to his kid. Something like this shouldn’t have happened. He couldn’t lose track of him on this ship, not with so many uncertainties.

He just had to be more careful.

After Joshua dozed off, Gordon lay still, watching the clock on the arm of the suit change numbers, his mind drifting. As his eyes drooped, he thought he saw the shadows on the wall change, as if something dark was passing through the loops of the string lights, but when he looked again, there was nothing there. One of the bulbs had burned out, though, so Gordon made a mental note to replace it and snuggled down around his son, hoping he could get at least a power nap’s worth of sleep before it was time to start the day.

Of course, that didn’t work out.

The low-oxygen alarm blared through the comm-system when the clock on Gordon’s suit read 05:12. He jerked out of a half-doze and felt Joshua jump in his arms. 

“Dad?!”

“It’s okay, I’m right here,” Gordon reassured him, squeezing him tight and rolling them both out of bed. “Let’s get into our suits just in case we’re needed. Dr. Coomer and Bubby are on shift tonight, they should get it fixed up quick. Keep your ears plugged, though.”

And sure enough, before they had even finished donning their suits, the alarm cut off, and they both sighed in relief. Gordon rubbed his ringing ears and helped Joshua get his fingers into the suit’s gloves.

The rest of the morning went about the same. After breakfast, Gordon fueled the engines, aligned the outputs, and diverted power to the proper sectors. He saw everyone else but Benrey and Forzen - though technically, he did see Forzen, he just didn’t talk to him. The man just stood and stared at Gordon and Joshua as they trotted back and forth through storage to mix the engine fuel. Gordon had fixed the wiring in that panel before, and he knew it didn’t take that long to do. He mentally filed away that behavior to talk about with Tommy later.

Then the comms went down.

Gordon didn’t even notice at first - he was too busy wrestling with the valve on the upper engine’s fuel compartment. The lower engine’s fuel valve was much easier to deal with - maybe he should add it to the work order list -

“DAD!” 

Gordon jumped and whipped around to see Joshua standing at his feet, a mulish expression on his face.

“You’re not _listening_ ,” he snapped, and Gordon realized his voice sounded muffled. 

“Hang on,” Gordon said, and rapped at the right side of his helmet, where the communication array was wired in. Though, now that he was paying attention, he realized that he could hear a faint buzz of static emanating from the comm array. 

“What?” Joshua stepped closer and ran into Gordon’s leg, wrapping an arm around it to stabilize himself as he kept looking up.

“Sorry, Josh,” Gordon said more loudly, and bent over to pick him up, settling him on his hip so Joshua’s head was next to his. “Sounds like the comms are down, so we can’t hear each other through the helmets. We’ll just have to talk loud until we get them back up.”

“OKAY!” Joshua yelled, and Gordon winced.

“You don’t have to scream, bud, I’m right here. Let’s just -” he was interrupted by a louder buzz of static, then a gentle chiming tune as the communications array came back online.

“Oh, never mind,” Gordon said, and bent over to put Joshua back on the floor. “My comms just came back up - how’s yours?”

Joshua tapped the side of his helmet imperiously, then nodded up at Gordon and gave a thumbs-up. “Loud and clear, Dad,” he said, and Gordon grinned. 

“Great,” he said, and turned back to the valve. “Let me just finish this and we’ll go get some lunch.”

But communications went down again within a minute, and stayed down for almost two minutes before coming back online. Then they went down again less than five minutes later, and stayed down. By that time, Gordon was already on his way down to the Communications room with Joshua in tow. He’d insisted on walking, so Gordon kept a tight grip on one of his little hands. Without the comms, if Joshie strayed too far, Gordon wouldn’t be able to hear him. The suits, including the helmets, were rated for the vacuum of space, hermetically sealed and pressurized. Sound could transmit if the noise was close, but get too far away and it was like yelling underwater. 

As they walked, Gordon kept turning his head to scan his surroundings. This would be the time something happened, when they were all separated and deaf to each other’s voices. He was just as concerned about happening upon a body as he was about being attacked by something. From the previous ship’s transmissions, that was how they found out something was wrong - one of the crewmembers found another dead on the floor in front of a control panel, and three more crewmembers turned up dead before the planet lost contact with the ship.

But that wouldn’t happen this time, Gordon told himself as they crossed into the wide-open storage area and he scanned around the crates. They had already gone longer than the previous ship did before they found the first body, so maybe things would be better on this trip. Maybe everything would be fine.

Yeah, right.

As Gordon and Joshua entered the hall the Communications room was in, they saw Benrey standing outside the doorway, looking down at something in his hand and shaking it. At the sound of their clanging footsteps he looked up and smoothly stepped aside, tucking the thing into a pocket on his suit as he held out his other hand in an overly dramatic “go ahead” gesture.

Gordon shook his head, but didn’t say anything as he walked past Benrey and into Communications. He felt Joshua tug on his hand as he turned to wave at Benrey, but Gordon didn’t turn to see if he waved back. Fuck that guy.

The situation didn’t seem much better inside. Forzen was typing rapidly at one computer station, his head down as coding scrolled across the screen. Tommy and Darnold were bent over another station, discussing something about the lifecycles of stars, which seemed off-topic to Gordon. Sunkist had crammed herself under one of the workstations, and her tail thumped when Joshua pulled against Gordon’s grip. Gordon let him go and he scrambled under the workstation with her, rubbing his suit gloves across her side and mussing up her long golden fur in the process. She bore his attentions with quiet dignity, then rolled her body back a little so she could reach up and bop Joshua with a paw, holding him down like an unruly puppy as she licked across his helmet’s faceplate. Gordon could hear Joshie giggling, though it was muffled at that distance, so he figured his kid was good. 

Forzen hit a key and looked up at the screen, then his shoulders tensed and he looked back down, hitting backspace several times and muttering about typing with gloves on. But when he hit enter again, Gordon heard the gentle chiming tune that meant his helmet array was back up. 

“Yes!” Forzen barked and pumped his fist. Gordon rolled his eyes.

“-wait for this cycle to - oh, hey, good job Forzen,” Darnold said. He and Tommy straightened up and looked over at Forzen, who leaned against the console and grinned. 

“That’s internal comms back up. What’s up with the relay back to the planet?”

Darnold made a face and looked up at Tommy. “That’s more his specialty than mine. Looks like some sort of solar flare activity.”

Tommy nodded. “Th- the sun looks like it’s going through some sort of, of active cycle right now. The increased radiation from the, um, solar flares is interfering with the relay. I - I don’t think we’ll be able to talk to Black Mesa for a while.” 

“Oh shit, no more data uploads? Sweet,” Benrey said from the doorway.

“N-no, we still have to do the updat- uploads,” Tommy said decisively, turning to look at Benrey. “They’ll just- they’ll just have to queue and then when the- when the sun quiets down they’ll go as a data burst.”

“Like the final transmission from the last ship,” Forzen said coldly.

“That’s - that’s right, Mr. Forzen!” Tommy said cheerily, either ignoring or oblivious to Forzen’s tone. Gordon was willing to bet he was just ignoring it. Tommy wasn’t a big fan of conflict. 

“So is the repair stable?” Gordon said just as the comms cut out with a buzz of static.

Forzen glared at him, then uncrossed his arms and turned back to the console. “You just _had_ to ask, didn’t you, just _had_ to say that,” he snarled, obviously speaking loud enough that they could all hear him. “You couldn’t just say ‘thank you,’ no, you gotta come in here and complain…” His voice trailed off into unintelligible muttering as he pulled another window up and typed in a query. 

“We should try rerouting through a satellite,” Darnold said as he and Tommy turned back to their console, pulling up a 3D visual of the solar system and zooming in. “We might have more luck with that.”

Tommy’s helmet nodded as he bent his tall frame over the model and reached into it to flick things around. Sunkist’s tail thumped under the table and Joshua squealed, and when Gordon turned to look for him, the shape in the doorway caught his eye.

Benrey was standing very still, his helmet tilted down so Gordon couldn’t see his eyes, only the bottom part of his face. His dark suit stood out like a shadow in the brightly-lit hallway, and the lights glinted on the surface of his helmet as he tilted his head slightly, apparently focused on Joshua. 

Something about his body language just wasn’t right, and Gordon found himself moving almost before he thought about it. He stepped in between Joshua and Benrey, breaking his sightline, then stalked up to Benrey and hissed “What is your FUCKING problem?”

He hoped he said it quietly enough that Benrey was the only one in proximity who could hear him. Benrey twitched a little and looked up, his eyes still shadowed.

“Huh? What?”

“Stop _staring_ at my kid,” Gordon snarled. “It’s fucking creepy.”

Benrey blinked at him, then smirked widely. “What, am I not allowed to look at people now, huh? Do I need your permission, to, uh, to see? Gordon Meanman over here, telling people where to look.” 

“Would you shut - no, I’m not telling you where to look, I’m telling you not to -” Gordon stopped, flustered and upset. “Look, just don’t stare at my kid, okay? You looked like a fucking, I don’t know, a tiger watching a deer. It’s fucking creepy. Don’t do that shit.”

“Wow,” Benrey said slowly. “You really, uh, you really care about him, huh?”

Gordon stared at him, nearly speechless, then snapped out “Of fucking _course_ I care about him, he’s my fucking _kid_!”

“Huh,” Benrey said. “Weird.” Then he tapped his helmet. “Comms are back up, by the way.”

Gordon turned around to see several pairs of eyes staring at him, including Sunkist’s, which somehow seemed to convey a vaguely disapproving attitude. Luckily she had a still-squealing Joshua under her forepaws, so hopefully he hadn’t heard all that. 

“Is - is everything okay, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy asked.

“It’s fine,” Gordon said shortly.

“Gordon Rudeman,” Benrey mumbled behind him as Gordon stomped away to stand between him and Joshua again. 

Forzen was watching with narrowed eyes, but he jerked a thumb over his shoulder and said “Should be good now. Compensated for the excess radiation. Helps that we’re moving away from the star, so our internal comms should be fine. Might cut out again here and there, but they should fix themselves, or be an easier fix than recoding the whole fucking receiver array to work off an internal circuit.”

“That’s impressive work, Forzen,” Darnold said, but he was frowning down at the 3D map projected over his workstation. “I think we’ll have to run some more simulations before we can try to do anything with the external system, though.”

“I’m going to try to- to find a database on the orbits and sun cycles,” Tommy said. “We, we can’t get back to the planet’s web for now, but the ship should - it should have databases for stuff like that. Maybe - it might show how long the solar flares will, um, will last.”

“Good idea, Dr. Coolatta,” Darnold said absently, magnifying the projected image of the star at the center of the solar system. Tommy beamed. Forzen said “ugh,” very quietly, and shoved past Gordon as he headed for the hall.

“I'm gonna go reset the cameras,” he said. “See if anything got picked up by the backups.”

“Has someone been monitoring the ship’s route?” Gordon asked. “That could have been affected by the loss of signal.”

“Y-yeah, Dr. Coomer is up there. Dr. Coomer?” Tommy flicked his hand to engage the long-range comms through his suit’s controls. 

“Hello, Tommy!” Dr. Coomer’s voice blasted out of the speakers in the upper corners of the room, and everyone collectively winced. “Have our communication problems been fixed?”

“Y-yep, they sure have,” Tommy said, tapping one finger rapidly to drop the volume. “But it’s only - they only work on the ship right now, so we- we can’t talk to the planet.”

“No more data uploads? Oh joy!” Dr. Coomer chirped.

Gordon ducked down to peer under the table as Tommy explained that no, the data uploads would continue, they’d just get dumped into an internal storage and released as a data burst when possible. Sunkist had her head down on top of Joshua, who was hugging her face with his arms and her neck with his legs.

“Okay Joshie, time to go,” Gordon said, reaching out to tap one of his gloves. Joshua let go of Sunkist and latched on to Gordon’s hand.

“Drag me!” he demanded.

Gordon snorted, but wrapped his hand securely around Joshua’s forearm. “Sunkist? What do you think?” 

Sunkist thumped her tail and raised her head, allowing Gordon to tug Joshua out from under the table and swing him up into the air in one motion, Joshua squealing with glee the whole way.

“Mr. Freeman?” Tommy had moved to the station opposite Darnold, and already had several windows up. “Could you check the engine alignment again? Dr. Coomer said the lower engine looks a few degrees mis- misaligned, but he wants a, um, a second opinion.”

“Yeah, of course, my other tasks are done. C’mon Joshie, let’s go back to the engine rooms.”

“Ughhhh,” Joshua complained, hanging bonelessly from Gordon’s grip. “We just _came_ from there!”

“Yeah, I know, but we gotta. Want me to carry you?”

“No,” Joshua said, and manfully climbed to his feet. “I can walk.” He then strutted toward the hall, taking the lead. Gordon grinned and waved back at Tommy and Darnold as they bent over their respective tasks. 

The hallway was empty, and so was the storage room, and the hall outside Electrical. Gordon had no idea where Benrey had gone, which worried him, but only in the vague sense that he might get jumpscared. Benrey seemed to enjoy stepping out from around corners and watching Gordon startle, or blasting his comm array with overcooked audio as he walked past a doorway. Gordon knew he was jumpy, and hated people taking advantage of that. It didn’t help that Joshua thought it was hilarious.

But as they walked into the lower engine room (Joshua having fallen behind to trot at Gordon’s heels), it wasn’t Benrey that Gordon nearly ran into, but Bubby.

He skidded slightly where the flooring changed from plastic to metal panels, trying to stop himself as Bubby jerked and glared at him, taking a step back himself.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Gordon snapped automatically. His default was offense, give him a break.

“Checking the engine alignment,” Bubby snapped back. “What’s your goddamn problem?”

“Could you _try_ not to swear in front of my kid?” Gordon asked automatically.

Bubby glared at him for a moment, then snorted and said, “Could _you_?” before turning away and heading toward the upper engine room. “Alignment’s good here, by the way. You’re _welcome_.”

Gordon watched him go, then glanced back at Joshua and gave an overly dramatic shrug. Joshua smiled uncertainly up at him, and followed in a much more subdued manner as Gordon walked over to the alignment console. Just in case.

Everything did, in fact, appear to be in alignment. Gordon toggled the controls to double check, then relocked the console and glanced down at Joshua.

“Let’s just go double check the upper engine too, okay? Better safe than sorry.”

“Better safe than blasted into space,” Joshua mumbled in response, and Gordon blinked at the artificial, sing-song tone from his son.

“That’s...morbid.”

“Mr. Bubby says it,” Joshua said as they started up the long corridor between the engine rooms.

“I have _got_ to talk to him about that,” Gordon muttered to himself, then told Joshua, “No one is getting blasted into space, no matter what Mr. Bubby says.”

As they got closer to the intersection of the reactor and security rooms, Gordon slowed slightly, holding a hand down to keep Joshua behind him. He could hear Forzen’s voice speaking in Security, which wasn’t unusual, but he couldn’t hear who was responding, which was. But after a few more muffled comments, Forzen went quiet, and Gordon shrugged and kept walking.

He nearly ran into Bubby again as he turned into the upper engine room. In his defense, this time Bubby was standing tucked up against the wall, as if he was waiting for someone to come around the bend. Gordon twitched backward and made a noise akin to a verbal keysmash, then quickly stepped away, grabbing Joshua and tugging him behind his legs.

“What are you _doing_?” he snarled, his heart pounding. He was going to have an anxiety attack, he was going to die young on a subpar spaceship because people wouldn’t stop _startling_ him.

Bubby just glared. “Waiting for you, _Doctor_ Freeman. Here to check my work?” His voice was scathing.

“Would you just - no, you know what, yes, I am. Tommy asked me to check the engines, so I’m _checking_ the _engines_. I didn’t know _you_ would be doing the same thing.” He felt Joshua’s hand tighten in his, and sighed. He should really try to be a better example. “Look, two sets of eyes are better than one with this ship, right?”

“Or you could just _trust_ me,” Bubby snapped.

Gordon gaped at him. “I don’t _know_ you! I only met you a few weeks ago! And yeah, Dr. Coomer said he’d vouch for you, but he never talked about you before - it’s like you just, just _appeared_ one day and suddenly he’s saying he’s known you forever!” 

Bubby had gone very still, the lines around his mouth drawn tight. Then he turned his head a little, and the way the engine lights reflected off the visor completely obscured his face.

“Fine,” he said quietly, and he sounded angry and so, so tired. Gordon almost felt bad for him - but not really, because they were _all_ tired. “Do whatever you want. I’m going back to Navigation.”

Gordon watched as he stalked away, and felt like he should say something - but then Bubby was gone down the hall, and it was too late. He swore mentally - he probably shouldn’t be aggravating people he already didn’t trust - but what was done was done.

“I could have handled that better,” he told Joshua, who just stared up at him, not smiling anymore. “I’m sorry, kiddo. C’mere - I’ll let you toggle the controls.”

“No thanks,” Joshua said, and let his hand drop out of Gordon’s as Gordon stepped away. “I’m okay.”

Gordon paused, then sighed and headed over to check the console. Again, everything was perfectly aligned, and it made him feel a little worse at his snappish attitude with Bubby. But the guy brought it out of him with his own attitude - he, Benrey, and Forzen all pushed Gordon’s buttons and seemed to enjoy it. He enjoyed working with Dr. Coomer, Tommy, and Darnold, but as for the other three...

“Dad?” Joshua’s voice came from behind Gordon. They were on their way to the Cafeteria now, since they hadn’t had lunch yet, and Gordon turned back to see Joshua standing a few feet behind him, looking around. “Did the power go out again?”

Joshua’s faceplate was completely black.

“What the - no, your visor -” Gordon started as he took a step toward Joshua, then froze as his own visor went black. He knew the faceplates had darkening abilities for spacewalking - the unfiltered light of a star was usually pretty bright - but he hadn’t known they could go entirely black. 

“Hang on, Joshie, it’s a visor malfunction. Mine just went, too. Try your glove settings -”

Then something slammed into his head, knocking him into the wall and then to the ground. The helmets had padding, but not enough for a blow like that, and the last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was Joshua calling for him.

“Dad? Dad! Da…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is a very bad pseudo-pun. I'm not sorry.
> 
> Come yell at me on Tumblr about space and all the research on solar flares I'm going to have to be doing soon: @antilocaprine


	6. Joshua’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE! It's a new chapter! I know, I know, much quicker than normal, but a lot of this is rehashing stuff that happened last chapter, just with a different POV, and I didn't want to leave y'all hanging for TOO long after the end of the last chapter. I needed an outsider's view before we pick up Benrey's POV next time - which will overlap with the end of this chapter a little bit, as well. And we get a tense change here, because in my experience little kids think in more immediate terms, and I'm used to writing in present tense from my last fic. Hopefully it works out okay without being too awkward.
> 
> ...I keep saying I have stuff planned out, then new things happen and at this point I'm just rolling with it. Hopefully we get a coherent final project out of it in the end. Thank you all for your continued support. Comments are always appreciated!

Joshua Freeman is having a rough day.

It starts before the day even does, with a nightmare that wakes him up in the middle of the night. He can’t remember specifics, only the memory of being outside the ship and the image of his father being pulled away from him into the depths of space, leaving him floating aimlessly as the ship moves further and further away in the opposite direction, and the feeling of dark hands gripping at his suit as they engulf his father, leaving Joshua alone in the starless void.

The shock of fear wakes him up, and he lays very still under his blankets, listening to his dad snore and staring at the glow of the string lights looping around the upper edges of the room.

Then one loop of the lights moves, swinging slightly out from the wall.

Joshua gasps, and the tiny light bulbs clink against the wall as the loop thumps back against the bulkhead. He stares wide-eyed into the dim room, and just before he blinks it looks like something else moves in the wall, like it’s a layer of water and there’s a shark just underneath.

He makes a decision and whispers “Dad? ...Dad…. Dad?” When his father keeps snoring, he has to speak louder, and on the fifth or sixth call his dad wakes with a snort.

His dad climbs onto his bed when Joshua tells him he had a bad dream, and Joshua can’t help but wrap his arms around his dad’s middle, burying his head under the blanket around his shoulders. His dad does his best to comfort him, and it does help - he seems pretty sure about the ship being okay. Joshua is still worried, but he’s a big kid, so he won’t keep asking his dad for reassurance. He’s a crewmember, after all, and he needs to pull his own weight.

When they both lay down on Joshua’s bed, Joshua snuggles back under the covers facing his dad’s chest and resolutely closes his eyes. If there _is_ something in the walls, his dad will take care of it.

He’s woken up to a screeching alarm and the arm displays on both their suits flashing “LOW O2” in big red letters. Joshua plugs his ears and tries not to whimper from the piercing noise as his dad helps him slide his feet into his suit. He doesn’t get to wear his cowboy pajamas on the ship - instead, everyone wears something called an “underlayer” that’s snug against his skin, with alternating soft and hard patches. It goes over his feet like the footie pajamas he outgrew ages ago, but ends at the wrists, so the suit gloves are the only layer over his hands. Luckily the alarm ends before Joshua has to unplug his ears to put his arms in the suit.

Joshua and his dad both have their suits almost all the way on, except for the helmets, when Joshua stops and tugs at a pouch on his dad’s hip.

“Dad? I have to go to the bathroom.”

His dad sighs and helps him pull the suit back down to his hips, then opens the door at the back of their room that leads to the tiny toilet and sonic shower. (Joshua kind of hates the sonic shower - it always makes his ears hurt, even though his dad says it doesn’t sound like anything but the whoosh of air as all the dirt and stinky things get whisked out of the tiny space into the waste tubes.)

Then, there’s something wrong with breakfast. No one cooks on the ship - instead, there are lots of prepackaged foods in different crinkly wrappers, and other dehydrated and freeze-dried meals. Joshua normally likes the apple cinnamon mush for breakfast - it’s a little packet that he can just add water to - but something went wrong with the packaging of this pouch, and when his dad pours warm water on it, it turns dark brown and gunky and smells rotten.

Joshua’s dad sighs again, then goes to check for another packet of apple cinnamon mush, but there aren’t any left in today’s ration. Joshua begs him to open tomorrow’s ration, but his dad tells him no, and gives him a packet of strawberry mush instead.

Joshua hates strawberries, but he eats it, because he’s not a baby.

After breakfast, his dad has a bunch of tasks to do, and Joshua follows him from one end of the ship to the other. They go back and forth from Storage to the engine rooms a bunch of times, and Mr. Forzen is in Storage the whole time. He doesn’t say anything, though, just watches them go by. Mr. Forzen always seems angry. Joshua doesn’t like him very much.

He sees Tommy and Sunkist early on, as well as Dr. Coomer, Mr. Bubby, and Dr. Pepper, and then he watches Benrey sneak around the edge of the room while his dad is filling the lower engine’s fuel tank. Benrey keeps his back to the wall and takes big, quiet steps, and holds one finger up over his weird visor when Joshua almost giggles out loud. Joshua can’t cover his mouth with his hands - the helmet’s in the way - but he bites his lip and bounces on his feet as Benrey sneaks around the corner and into the hallway toward the reactor room. He sticks his head back around the corner and looks at Joshua’s dad, then down at Joshua and winks, holding up a finger in a shushing motion again. Joshua makes a quiet coyote sign back at him, which Benrey seems confused by, but he ducks away when Joshua’s dad turns around.

Joshua is continuing to retell a story he saw on a broadcast once when he realizes his dad isn’t listening to him. He’s usually at least making noises when Joshua pauses for breath, but now he’s messing with something in the fueling area, and the fuel can is empty. Joshua saw him pour it all in, so he’s just not paying attention, and that’s rude. He’s told Joshua that’s rude.

“DAD! You’re not LISTENING!” he exclaims, and his dad jumps and looks over and says something that Joshua can barely hear, and that’s how they learn the comms are down. Joshua usually hears a little bit of a buzz from his helmet, so he didn’t think much of it when the sound changed to being more staticky. But it changes a bunch more times, quiet then loud, then quiet again, and finally his dad sighs and goes to pick him up.

“No! I can walk,” Joshua insists, because he’s not a baby. 

“Josh, if the comms go down again I won’t be able to hear you,” his dad says.

“I wanna walk,” Joshua insists, and his dad says okay and holds out his hand. 

He _is_ getting kind of tired by the time they get down to Communications, but that’s because they’ve been walking a lot and they haven't had lunch yet, and no one can get energy from dumb strawberry mush anyway. So that’s why Joshua’s tired. 

Benrey’s in the hallway and he makes a dramatic “after you” gesture for them both, sticking out his arm and leg and bowing toward the doorway to Communications. Joshua grins at him and turns as his dad walks by to wave up at Benrey, who looks down at him and makes the quiet coyote hand gesture - awkwardly, as if he’s not sure he’s doing it right. Joshua nods and holds a finger up in front of his faceplate in a “shush” gesture, and Benrey grins.

Joshua’s dad tugs at his hand and he hurries into the room after him. The grown-ups are doing computer stuff, but Sunkist is here and she wags her tail when she sees him. He pulls loose from his dad’s grip and wiggles under the table with her, petting her as much as he can with the poor feedback from the gloves. She leans back and pushes him down into a doggy hug with her paw, and he rolls to the ground as she licks across his faceplate. Her tongue looks funny when it presses against the visor, and leaves streaks that Joshua’s dad will have to clean off later.

There’s a lot of talking and Joshua’s helmet makes some noises, then finally it seems like it’s fixed when he hears his dad yelling at Benrey across the room. Joshua’s dad yells at everyone, but this time he actually sounds kind of angry - but at the same time Sunkist thunks her head down across Joshua’s whole body, and he’s distracted by the furry weight and not being able to see past her golden hair.

A minute later Joshua’s dad tells him it’s time to go, and Joshua gets him to drag him across the floor and swing him up into the air, which is always fun. But then he tells Joshua they have to go back to the engine rooms, and that’s definitely not fun. They’ve already spent _hours_ in the engine rooms, and Joshua’s getting hungry, and his dad said they’d have lunch next _ages_ ago.

But still, the ship is important, so Joshua climbs to his feet and leads the way out of the room, so his dad won’t think he’s being lazy.

Then Mr. Bubby is already in the lower engine room, and he and Joshua’s dad snap at each other in the way Joshua’s dad always tells him not to talk to other people. Joshua’s dad seems like he’s trying to make it a joke with Joshua, but Joshua doesn’t think it’s a joke to Mr. Bubby. 

He’s even more sure it’s not a joke to Mr. Bubby when he startles Joshua’s dad going into the upper engine room, though his dad does make a really funny noise. It’s more fun when Benrey startles him, though, because Benrey always grins at Joshua afterward, like they played a prank on Joshua’s dad together. Mr. Bubby doesn’t look down at Joshua at all as he and Joshua’s dad growl at each other, and then Mr. Bubby storms off, and neither of them say sorry.

Joshua’s dad sighs. “I could have handled that better,” he says to Joshua. “I’m sorry, kiddo. C’mere - I’ll let you toggle the controls.”

But Joshua shakes his head. He’s pretty sure his dad should be apologizing to Mr. Bubby, not him. Dr. Coomer tells Joshua stories about Mr. Bubby all the time when they’re eating lunch together, and Mr. Bubby always looks so pleased and adds in details that Dr. Coomer forgets that make the stories even better. His dad is usually talking with Tommy, or he’s with them but he’s not really listening. He’ll chime in with stories from when he and Tommy and Dr. Coomer worked together, but he doesn’t really pay attention when Dr. Coomer’s talking about “the good old days.” Maybe he meant Dr. Coomer didn’t talk about Mr. Bubby before Mr. Bubby joined the crew. Dr. Coomer definitely seems happier now that he’s here, and he’s almost always with Mr. Bubby. Joshua was kind of surprised to see Mr. Bubby alone in the engine rooms, but it sounds like Dr. Coomer sent him there, so that makes sense.

Joshua doesn’t feel like talking, so he waits quietly while his dad checks the engines, spinning his torso back and forth aimlessly. He wants to move, but he also wants to sit down, and mostly he wants to eat something. His dad’s really strict about not eating snacks in most of the ship, since that would involve taking their helmets off, which they can only do in the cafeteria and common areas, the medbay, and their room, all of which are pretty close together.

“Okay, Josh, let’s go get some food,” his dad finally says, and Joshua falls in behind him as he walks by. He sees that his dad puts his hand down, but he doesn’t take it, and his dad doesn’t push him. Joshua isn’t sure why he’s being contrary, but he’s glad they’re finally going to eat something.

They only get a little way out of the engine room when Joshua’s view goes dark. He stops immediately - it must be a power outage - but normally the emergency lights are on, and they have lights on their suits that come on in low-light situations, and he can’t see _anything_.

“Dad?” Joshua asks, swiveling his head to try to catch a glimpse of light, any light. “Did the power go out again?”

“What the - no, your visor,” his dad says, then stops. “Hang on, Joshie, it’s a visor malfunction. Mine just went, too. Try your glove settings -”

His voice cuts off as something clangs, then there is a horrible clattering thump, and Joshua freezes.

“Dad?” No answer. “Dad! Dad? Dad, where are you?”

He reaches out and takes a stumbling step forward. He isn’t a baby, okay, but it’s dark, and his dad isn’t saying anything, and something big just hit the floor and Joshua is - okay, he’s scared, but only a little bit. He isn’t a _baby_.

“Dad?” Still nothing. Was his dad this far away from him? In the dark, Joshua can’t remember. “Hello? Please…” He trails off, struggling. He’s not going to start crying. He’s _not_.

There’s some sort of noise, something that sounds like voices, but far away and muffled. He pauses and realizes the buzzing electrical noise in his helmet has changed to static. The comms are down, again. This is the worst time for that, but it reminds him he _could_ call out, make a report to ask for help - but then if it’s just a visor malfunction, everyone would laugh at him, and that would be _awful_. He’s a big kid, and he’s not going to be a scaredy-cat about this.

“Dad, where _are_ you?” he says in a louder voice, and takes another step, arms still out, but something bumps into his legs and he falls down hard. He catches himself on his hands and feels around, but there’s nothing there. 

“Hello? This isn’t _funny_ ,” he says, because maybe it’s a joke, but he doesn’t like it. He crawls forward so he won’t fall again, and his arm bumps against something. He reaches up - there’s still muffled sound around him, a rush of noise somewhere nearby, so maybe the grown-ups are laughing - but then he feels the smooth curve of a faceplate, and it feels like something washes over his head as his chest goes cold. 

And then something grabs his shoulder.

It feels weirdly wrong - _dark hands in the blackness of space, the sight of his father vanishing into the void_ \- and he jerks away with a yelp. There’s pressure on his helmet and he tries to pull away again, but then his helmet chimes to say his comm array is back up, and he hears a voice speaking quickly.

“-kay, whoa, hey, slow down there, lil Freeman, it’s okay.”

Joshua turns his head, one hand held out behind him. “...Benrey?”

“Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s me, just Benrey.”

“Where’s my dad?” Joshua asks in a tiny voice, but his other hand is still on the smooth curve he ran into - the faceplate of his dad’s helmet on the ground. He’s sure of it.

“It’s, uh, he’s right here,” Benrey says, and he sounds shakier than Joshua’s ever heard him. “Hang on, let me -” Joshua feels him move around him, hears the clink of a buckle as he shuffles up next to Joshua’s dad.

“Okay, that’s not, uhhh - huh, let me just -” Benrey fumbles for a moment, then Joshua feels pressure on his helmet again. “Hang on, hold still, let me see if I can -”

Light floods Joshua’s vision and he winces, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment as they sting with sharp pain from the unexpected assault.

“Oh shit - shoot, sorry, should have warned you,” Benrey says, and Joshua opens his eyes again to see him crouched in front of him, one knee on the ground, next to -

“DAD!” Joshua scrambles forward and grabs his dad’s shoulder. He’s got a section of wall panel half-covering him, with thick metal pipes attached to the top of it, and there’s some sort of gas venting into the hallway from the exposed hole in the bulkhead. Its thready hiss almost sounds like a distant voice, and Joshua figures that must be the noise he heard before Benrey found them.

“He’s uh, he’s alive, but he doesn’t look...great,” Benrey is saying. “So I, uh, left his visor dark. He doesn’t look great,” he says again, and Joshua looks up at him. Benrey seems spooked, and that’s not right. Grown-ups are supposed to know what to do.

“He’s not _moving_ ,” Joshua says, and he’s ashamed to realize his eyes are watering and he has to sniffle before he can talk again. “Is he...is he gonna be okay?”

Benrey looks panicked, his weird eyes flicking around. “I, uh - m’sure he’s gonna be - it’s prob'ly - oh hey, here’s -” and he cuts himself off to bellow “TOMMY!” at full volume. 

Joshua flinches and turns around to see Tommy and Dr. Pepper racing down the hall from the direction of the cafeteria, their boots clanging on the floor panels, with Sunkist right behind them. 

“We got the report,” Tommy pants as they skid to a halt and he and Dr. Pepper drop to their knees on the other side of Joshua’s dad. Sunkist leaps over him and the section of wall and lands on Benrey’s other side, shouldering him out of the way and curling her body around Joshua. He leans back against her and wraps his shaking arms around her neck, burying his helmet in her fur.

“Is my dad gonna die?” He speaks into Sunkist’s fur, but it’s meant for everyone close enough to hear.

“No,” Tommy says firmly, “your dad’s gonna be fine. Just as fine as a, um, a corn snake on a sunny day.”

Joshua rolls his head to peer around Sunkist’s snout with one eye. “Promise?”

Dr. Pepper has some sort of a scanner in his hand, and he’s leaning up on his knees so he can hold it over Joshua’s dad’s helmet. “Promise,” he says. “He took a knock to the head, but we can fix it up.” He looks up at Joshua and smiles, his dark eyes kind. “It’s handy this happened so close to the MedBay - we don’t have to move him far.”

Dr. Coomer and Mr. Bubby are there by then, and they all help carry Joshua’s dad into the MedBay. Joshua follows after, holding tight to Sunkist with one hand and Benrey’s kneepad with the other. He’s not sure why he wants Benrey close, but he was the first one to find them, and he and Joshua have fun messing with Joshua’s dad, so they must be friends.

Forzen sticks his head in, mouth full of food and grumbling about “the _one time_ I’m not on the cameras Freeman gets taken out by a _wall_ , what the fuck -” before Dr. Pepper shoos him out.

“I have to seal the air shield, so everyone needs to get out,” Dr. Pepper tells the roomful of people. Joshua lets go of Sunkist and tows Benrey toward his dad’s bed. Dr. Pepper smiles down at him. “Not you, of course, Joshua. You can stay.”

“Let’s - we need to meet about this,” Tommy says as he pushes Dr. Coomer out of the room, Mr. Bubby following behind. “It looks like a, a, um, freak accident, but we need to fix the wall, and see if any other panels are, um, unstable…” His voice trails off as he rounds the corner. Sunkist takes a few steps, then pauses and looks back at Joshua with a whine.

He _doesn’t_ need her. Joshua’s hand tightens on Benrey’s suit leg as he watches Dr. Pepper open a wall cabinet and pull out several things.

“Dr. Pepper?” Joshua says, and hates how much his voice shakes.

Dr. Pepper looks up and seems surprised to see all of them still in the room. 

“Can, um…” Joshua doesn’t want to ask Benrey directly. He’s a big kid, he is, but his dad is very still and very quiet and not even snoring, and his visor is still black and it’s - it’s scary, it is, and Joshua’s dad tells him it’s okay to be scared, he just has to tell him, but Joshua’s dad is very still and quiet right now, so telling him wouldn’t do anything. “Can Benrey stay, too?”

Dr. Pepper blinks and opens his mouth, before looking at Benrey and closing his mouth with a click that Joshua can hear across the room. Then he nods and smiles as he looks back down at Joshua. “Sure,” he says. “Benrey can stay, too.”

Sunkist gives a gentle “ _boof_ ,” and trots into the hall after Tommy. Dr. Pepper hits a button on the wall and wheels a cart over to the bed Joshua’s dad is on, pulling items off shelves as he goes. By the time he reaches the bedside, the top shelf of the cart has medical instruments stacked three layers high, and Joshua’s worried something’s going to fall off.

Dr. Pepper makes a weird expression at Benrey. Joshua can’t see Benrey’s face, but after a moment he crouches down. “Hey, uh, little, um… larval Freeman,” he says. “How about we, uh, play a game?”

Joshua stares at him. The air shield buzzes quietly in the background.

“Or, uh,” Benrey looks up, but Dr. Pepper and Joshua’s dad are behind him, so he can’t see whatever hand motions are happening. Benrey shakes his head, and his eyebrows do something weird. Then he looks back down at Joshua. “We could, um...get something to eat?”

“I’m not leaving my dad,” Joshua says, but he _is_ hungry. “Do you… do you have food?”

“Uhhhh,” Benrey says, then reaches up to catch something out of the air. Dr. Pepper must have tossed it to him. “Yeah, sure, look, it’s um…” he pauses, squinting at the packaging.

Joshua reaches up and tugs it out of Benrey’s hand with a sigh. He peers at the granola bar and shows it to Benrey. “Chocolate chip, see? It’s in the picture.”

“Huh,” Benrey says, and straightens back up to his full height. “How about you, uh, eat that over here.”

Joshua looks up over his shoulder, but Dr. Pepper has some sort of cover over Joshua’s dad’s head. It has some dark splotches on it, though, almost like -

“No, hey, come over here,” Benrey says. “Can I - I’m gonna pick you up, okay? To get you up on the bed please?”

Joshua looks back at him and frowns, clutching his granola bar, before nodding and raising his elbows. Benrey picks him up awkwardly under the arms and almost drops him onto the bed next to the one Joshua’s dad is on, but facing away. 

“Stay - keep - I mean, don’t, uh - just keep looking this way,” Benrey says, looking flustered as he glances over Joshua’s shoulder. “Your dad’s fine, Darnold’s just, um, working. Eat your...nutrition...thing.”

“Can I take my helmet off?” Joshua asks mulishly.

“Air shield’s up, and MedBay’s sealed,” Dr. Pepper says briskly behind him. “You’re good to go.”

So Joshua unlocks his helmet and puts it on the bed next to him and eats the granola bar. He realizes he wasn’t as hungry as he thought he was, because he’s full after that - or maybe he feels a bit sick. Or maybe it’s both. He kicks his feet and wrinkles the granola bar wrapper in both hands and peers up at Benrey, who’s looking over his shoulder at the bed behind him.

“Why are your eyes that color?”

Benrey twitches and looks down at him, blinking several times behind his weird visor. “Uh…” he says. “...Contacts.”

Joshua looks at him for a second, then shrugs. “Okay. Who’s your favorite cowboy?”

Benrey stares at him. “...Huh?”

“ _My_ favorite cowboy is Annie Oakley,” Joshua says. “Dad says she’s a cowboy even though she was a girl because she was the best shot, and she rode horses, so she had to be a cowboy. My second favorite is Roy Rogers because he has a horse named Trigger.” 

“Uh...okay,” Benrey says, looking confused.

“Is my dad gonna be all right?” Joshua asks, again, because he has to be sure.

“He’s going to be just fine,” Dr. Pepper says behind Joshua, and Joshua starts to turn around, but Benrey holds a hand out to block his view and says “no-uhhh” in a funny voice.

“He is, Joshua,” Dr. Pepper says again. “You can come see in just a few minutes. I just have to clean him up a bit first so he doesn’t look scary.”

Joshua doesn’t say anything. His dad already looked scary lying piled up on the floor under the hissing wall panel with his visor blacked out. Whatever’s going on now can’t be worse, but the fact that no one wants him to see is scaring him more than whatever might be there. Does his dad not have a face anymore? Did his head get bashed in? His helmet had a dent in it, but it wasn’t huge. Joshua doesn’t know what to think.

He spends the next few minutes crinkling the wrapper in his fingers and swinging his feet. He accidentally kicks one of Benrey’s gloves and gets worried he’s about to get yelled at, but Benrey just bops the toe of his boot with his hand, and then they’re playing a weird game where Joshua swings his feet and Benrey tries to catch his boots, only he’s always a bit too slow.

“Okay,” Dr. Pepper sighs from behind Joshua. “I think we’re good.”

Joshua spins around before Benrey can stop him and rises up on his knees to look at the next bed over. His dad is still in most of his suit, though it’s been pulled down off his shoulders, leaving his right arm exposed. His glasses are off, and his ponytail is pushed off to the side, letting his hair fan out across one shoulder. He’s got a bandage on the left side of his head that covers part of his forehead, and Joshua can see a few bundled up cloths that have a lot of red on them on Dr. Pepper’s cart before he wheels it away. Joshua’s dad looks very pale, and he’s too still, too quiet.

Joshua kicks off his bed and pulls at the edge of his dad’s mattress.

“Whoa, hang on, let me -” Benrey hurries around the other bed and swings Joshua up next to his dad. Then he reaches over and plunks Joshua’s helmet down on his lap. “Make sure you hold onto this, okay?”

“Okay,” Joshua says without looking at him. He reaches out and pokes his dad’s cheek. His dad doesn’t move. “Is he…”

“He’s fine, he just lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Pepper says. “That’s what this is for.” He taps at the cuff around Joshua’s dad’s right wrist on the other side of his body. “It’s giving him blood and nutrients, so he doesn’t need to eat or drink anything until he wakes up. Which should be…” he looks at the display on his suit’s arm. “Hmm, less than an hour.”

“Okay,” Joshua says, and wriggles down on the bed next to his dad. “I’ll wait here, then.”

“That’s just fine.” Joshua can hear the smile in Dr. Pepper’s voice. “Benrey, do you want to…”

“I’ll stay,” Benrey says, and Joshua doesn’t look back at him, but he’s pleased about that. Two sets of eyes are better than one with this ship, right? That’s what his dad said, and his dad’s the smartest.

Joshua snuggles down in the crook of his dad’s arm and rests his head on his dad’s shoulder. The suit isn’t super comfortable, but this close he can see and feel his dad breathing, and keep an eye on the tube that’s connected to his dad’s wrist. This way he’ll be ready, if anything else goes wrong.

Joshua rubs at his face to wipe away the dried tears and snot. He doesn’t want his dad to think he was scared enough to cry. He’s a crewmate, and things happen on spaceships, and he has to be ready. His dad told him that. He’s just not sure if this is normal for “things happening.”

He settles his head on his dad’s shoulder and closes his eyes, listening to the soft rasp of his dad’s breath, and the quiet clinks and rattles as Dr. Pepper putters around with test tubes and medical gear, and a gentle off-key hum from somewhere over his shoulder that must be Benrey.

Joshua Freeman has had a rough day, but hopefully from now on, things will be better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come yell at me on tumblr @antilocaprine


	7. Coloring Inside The Lines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a _lot_ of exposition - like 7,000 words' worth of exposition, but it should be the last chapter with major past-time elements in it. It's also basically the opposite of "show, don't tell" - there's a lot of telling and not enough showing - but I wanted to get most of this stuff out of the way now so I wouldn't have to worry about it later. Ideally, everything from now on will be mostly in real-time, rather than jumping all over the place chapter by chapter. But I've said how I planned things to be before, only to have the actual plot turn out differently, so we'll see how things go. Comments are always appreciated!

The ship was three weeks out from the planet, and Benrey was bored.

Not that that was a bad thing, necessarily - he’d spent much of his existence constantly moving faster than everything around him in an attempt to gain a few precious moments of peace. Boredom was a relaxing novelty. And it gave him time to just...observe, without worrying about the Supervisors jumping him, or some human boss asking why he was in the wrong area of the complex. He never had scored very high on job performance in Black Mesa...

He enjoyed drifting aimlessly through the corridors, getting in the humans’ ways and generally making a nuisance of himself. It was...okay, fine, it was _fun_ to mess with them. He enjoyed it. He hadn’t spent much time with any particular humans planetside, and he was beginning to think that was a mistake. It was like watching a trashy broadcast sometimes, with all the dramas and suspicions and friendships, but a broadcast he could affect if he cared to. And sometimes he did.

He was especially invested in winding Forzen up and freaking Gordon out. 

Gordon was easy - the man startled at the slightest surprise, and he made some fascinating noises when Benrey stepped out of the shadows or jumped out from behind a corner. He hadn’t actually fallen on his ass in surprise yet, but Benrey knew he could get that reaction. He just had to try a little harder. 

Gordon’s kid was interesting in its own way, too. It was - _he_ was - like his own little person, but his sense of humor was much better than Gordon’s. Benrey could count on him to distract his dad to allow Benrey to sneak up closer, or get into a better position to startle him. And the kid’s expressions were so open, so close to the surface - Benrey never had to guess what he was feeling, because it was all right there on his miniature face. If Benrey wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to something that happened at mealtimes or in a group, he could glance at Gordon’s kid and get a gauge on whether to laugh, frown, act annoyed, or whatever. It wasn’t foolproof - the kid spent a lot of time during the longer meetings under a table coloring or drawing, and then Benrey couldn’t use him as a human-emotion-meter at all.

That in itself was interesting, too, because he seemed to be encouraged to deviate from the suggested activities in the coloring booklets. There were thick, dark lines delineating the part of the page that was supposed to be colored in (based on the examples on the front and back covers), and yet the child often scribbled over the lines, added extras like wings or multiple tails, or even colored everything _but_ the central detailed image on the page. And he wasn’t punished for it - in fact, Gordon was often most interested in the pages where his child _didn't_ follow the rules. 

Benrey spent several hours one night sitting under the conference table, paging carefully through the coloring books, trying to make sense of them. They contained a variety of images, mostly animals, spaceships, and something called “western friends.” The kid didn’t seem to have a pattern for what he colored, appearing to pick pages at random, leading to some pages being colored and others remaining blank but for the lines of the printed image. It made something under Benrey’s surface crawl, like he should be correcting the aberrations to ensure the kid wouldn’t get in trouble with - but then again, he didn’t have Supervisors breathing down his neck. He just had his dad looking at a mess of colors and shapes on a page and saying variations of “wow, that looks pretty cool!” and Benrey didn’t really know what to think about that. 

Forzen was more of a challenge to get to. He was twitchy and paranoid, more aggressively reactive than the rest of the crewmembers, and he seemed to understand more about what they were up against. He would often whip around to stare at vent grates, or walk out of a room and then dart back in to look around. He spent a lot of time in the security room, watching the cameras - but when he wasn’t there, his movements were largely unpredictable.

Honestly, if Benrey couldn’t walk through walls, Forzen might have caught him by now. He couldn’t help but be begrudgingly impressed by the human’s sense of awareness.

But he also couldn’t help himself from doing everything in his power to increase Forzen’s paranoia. He changed phase and lurked in the vents, rattling the grates when Forzen was nearby before whipping away, changing phase back to solid, and walking past him in another direction in plain sight. He snuck through the walls and shifted objects just a few inches on desks and tables - enough that Forzen noticed, but not enough for him to be sure the thing had actually moved. He was even in the middle of a long-term project of moving everything in Forzen’s room slightly to the left, but he had to be very careful with that, because Forzen had begun leaving motion traps - a piece of string laid across a drawer, pillow fluff across a doorway, water droplets on the countertop, that sort of thing.

But even better than the days when he hid in vents and hissed at Forzen were the days when he did nothing at all and watched Forzen twitch and look over his shoulder just as much. He was pretty sure he could get the human to have some sort of a nervous breakdown before another week was up, and he was looking forward to it. 

In the meantime he enjoyed just existing among the crew, lethargically completing the daily tasks on his checklist, stalking Gordon, tagging after Tommy, the usual. He was surprised to realize he had missed Tommy - they first met almost a decade ago, when Benrey was fresh out of space and struggling to blend in planetside. Tommy himself was a little left of human - his eyes glowed in the dark sometimes, and his scent was unique, fizzy and sparkling like a carbonated drink, while humans smelled more like different kinds of dirt. He had helped Benrey fit in and get a job, but then something happened with his adopted father and he had to move across the planet, and Benrey hadn’t seen him again. He wasn’t sure how much Tommy actually knew about him and what he was - but he didn’t exactly know what Tommy was, either, so he supposed they were even.

Occasionally, he remembered that he had a “partner” on the ship and checked in on him, but Bubby wasn’t very interesting. The treatment the Supervisors used was fickle, and usually resulted in memory problems of one kind or another. Bubby seemed mostly unaware that he had an ulterior motive on the ship, but he was obviously still on an internal timetable. Benrey followed him around for three full-day cycles in a row a week or so into the voyage, and noticed that he set off sabotages between two and six times a cycle in a seemingly compulsive fashion. If he was on his own, or with someone (usually Dr. Coomer) and they were distracted, he would go very still, raise his arm, and flick through the suit’s display to a screen Benrey hadn’t seen on any other suit - a red-edged diagram of the ship with circular symbols in almost every room. He would tap on one seemingly at random, then flick out of the screen and drop his arm. After a moment, he would blink, shake his head, and seem to tune back in to whatever he’d been doing before, apparently without noticing that he’d lost time. Twice Benrey had watched him set off sabotages, only to then be the first one to reach the site and fix them before anyone else even arrived - and he appeared just as exasperated as the rest of the crew at the continual interruptions. 

It seemed like a fairly inefficient way for an agent to operate, and Benrey wondered just how much testing the Supervisors had done before turning him loose. He was better than most other treated humans that Benrey had encountered planetside - those had been little more than robots, mechanically following orders, but unable to do much on their own. This was certainly better than that, but unsettling in a different way. Benrey knew what it was like to lose control over himself thanks to the Supervisors’ meddling, and even though Bubby didn’t seem to know what was happening to him, it was still unpleasant to watch.

Monitoring Bubby did make Benrey realize he had the same sabotage function on his own suit’s arm display. He’d probably been told about it at some point and promptly forgotten, but he had a fun day hitting the “reactor meltdown” button over and over and over and over until the whole ship echoed with yells of frustration from every direction each time the alarm went off again. 

Intermittently, he felt the warning buzz under the surface of his skin that meant the nanochips were live and signaling, and he always braced himself for the pain, but it never came. Maybe the Supervisors were checking in to monitor the ship’s location, or maybe they were just messing with Benrey, reminding him they could hurt him at any time. He didn’t try to dig all the chips out anymore - it took too much effort, and he hated regrowing parts if he didn’t have to. But the chips would get itchy and make his muscles and joints twitch every few months, so he always ended up ripping parts of himself off anyway just for a bit of relief. Still, as long as they had a signal, the nanochips could propagate and regenerate themselves in the regrown tissue, so it was pointless.

But then the comms went down.

Benrey hadn’t touched that feature in two days, and he was in the same room as Bubby and Dr. Coomer when it happened, so it wasn’t Bubby’s doing, either. For a wild moment, Benrey thought there was another agent on the ship - but then he focused, and he could feel the faraway crackling of the star at the center of the system as it flung out loops of energy, high-powered solar flares sending waves of electromagnetic radiation washing out through space. It must have started several day-cycles ago, but the radiation had just started to hit the planet, and it was messing with the signal relay from Black Mesa to the ship.

Well, this could be interesting.

Dr. Coomer said something deeply insulting that caused Benrey to perk up, mentally storing it away for later use. Bubby snorted out a laugh and dropped the wires he was messing with to move forward and lean over Dr. Coomer’s shoulder, peering down at the glitching navigation screens.

Benrey stood up from the chair he’d been idly swiveling in and stretched as the comms came back up, then went down again. He felt his joints click and grind as he adjusted, and got flashes of numbness and tingling throughout his body as the nanochips lost signal and regained it again in turns. 

“Benrey, would you go check?” Dr. Coomer asked.

“Whuh?” He hadn’t been paying attention.

“Someone must be in Communications,” Dr. Coomer said. His voice was muffled by his helmet, and Benrey adjusted his hearing slightly to compensate. “Can you go see if they need help? Some sort of assistance is obviously needed, or this problem would be fixed by now!”

Benrey wasn’t sure what they expected of him. Forzen was the communications expert; he probably had things under control. Benrey wasn’t even sure what his specialty was supposed to be. The Supervisors had set his application up, and he never paid attention during orientations. He’d always figured things out eventually.

But it would be more interesting than hanging around here, listening to the two humans speculating about what the cause of the communication hiccup might be when he already knew the answer and couldn’t tell them without looking suspicious. So he agreed with a shrug and headed for Communications.

He was almost through the shielding control room when he idly pulled out the datacard to check Bubby’s stats. The card updated in real time, allowing Benrey to watch Bubby’s fluctuating weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and more. Presumably an agent with more drive would be using that information, but for Benrey it was nothing more than entertainment.

He slowed down when he realized the information wasn’t changing. Normally Bubby’s blood pressure was all over the place, and when he was with Coomer, his heart rate was unsteady, as well. But as Benrey stared at the card and shook it, the numbers remained static. He shook it again, and a tiny line of red text appeared along the top of the card that read “searching for connection…”

Benrey’s eyebrows rose. Now wasn’t _that_ interesting. He turned his attention inward and felt patches of numbness where the nanochips liked to gather around his joints and large muscle groups. He separated his arm from the suit and shifted its phase beneath the fabric to gaseous liquid and back to solid again, but the numbness remained.

The chips were offline. Bubby’s card was offline. Did that mean the Supervisors couldn’t control them right now? He shook the card again, but the “searching for connection…” text remained. Very, _very_ interesting.

He tucked the datacard away as he heard boots clanging on the flooring and looked up to see Gordon and his kid approaching. Benrey realized he was almost in front of the door to Communications, and he made a grand gesture to usher them into the room before him. Gordon huffed and shook his head, turning into the room as his kid waved up at Benrey. Something twinged in his memory, and he raised his own hand in the same gesture he’d seen the kid make that morning - thumb and middle fingers pinched together, outer fingers raised up, awkward with the gloves and the uncertain movements. 

He must have done it right, because the kid grinned up at him and raised his hand to put one finger in front of his faceplate in a “shush” motion. Benrey knew that one. So was the kid saying the “shush” gesture and the pinching gesture were the same thing? What was the point of that? Then again, humans had lots of different words that meant the same thing, so maybe this was like that, but with hand motions.

He was trying to puzzle it out, half-wondering if he could just ask the kid, when suddenly Gordon was all up in his face, snarling and possessive and protective, and that hurt a little. Benrey could have killed him a hundred times over - could have killed any of them whenever he wanted. He could have killed Gordon and his kid that morning when he was wandering through the walls, bored and watching Gordon lie to his child about how everything was going to be all right after the kid had a bad dream. There had been a moment or two when Benrey had wanted to reach into their strange, comforting little bubble so badly he’d partially phased through the bulkhead and accidentally moved some of the string lights they had hung up on their walls, but neither of them seemed to notice enough to bring it up with the other.

And now Gordon was accusing him of...what, of looking at his kid? What the fuck? What did it matter who he looked at? 

“You looked like a fucking, I don’t know, a tiger watching a deer,” Gordon snapped. “It’s fucking creepy. Don’t do that shit.”

“Wow,” Benrey said, a little taken aback at the vitriol. “You really, uh, you really care about him, huh?” That was obvious by this point, it was, but it was still so strange. Humans could reproduce so quickly, at any time of year - why did they care so much for individual offspring that could so easily be replaced?

Gordon looked almost apoplectic at that, and Benrey probably should feel bad about it, but winding Gordon up was too much fun. Even after Gordon stalked away to stand between Benrey and his kid, Benrey kept flicking his gaze down beneath the table and back up, hoping to catch Gordon’s eye - but he’d apparently decided to ignore Benrey, which was fair.

After some discussion, it sounded like the verdict was that they could maintain comms within the ship, but the electromagnetic radiation being put out by the solar storm was overpowering any long-range transmission between the ship and the planet. That was perfect. Benrey stepped back into the hall and checked the datacard again, but it still hadn’t updated. He stood and thought for a moment, dragging together his scattered braincells to focus on the single goal of keeping the signals from the planet blocked. He couldn’t affect the star - he was too far away to reach it, and anyway, he wasn’t sure he could even do that. Tommy had said he wasn’t sure how long the solar storm would last, so that meant Benrey might be running out of time. 

He _could_ go after the communications array. Those were usually near the back end of ships, to protect them from the magnetic field of the shields on the leading edge. Benrey made sure he was out of sight of any humans and cameras, then phased through the bulkhead.

Typically when he did this he stayed beneath the outer panels of the ship. It was moving fast enough that if he wasn’t concentrating when he phased through the exterior, he might get left behind. He would fix that this time by finding the array, phasing all the way through the ship’s hull, and becoming solid again. It wasn’t like the vacuum could hurt him.

Benrey wasted a few minutes fruitlessly trawling the back end of the ship before he went back toward where the communications room was inside, only to come to a sudden halt when he perceived the array - a series of boxes and dishes stuck haphazardly to the hull, right between a shield panel and an external garbage chute panel.

That...didn’t make any sense. That was just asking for trouble: if the comm array wasn’t disrupted by the physical shield panel, it would be disrupted eventually by the magnetic shields that deflected micrometeorites and other space debris before they could touch the hull. If the mag-shields didn’t disrupt the array’s signal, it might be physically damaged by something sent out through the garbage chute. Not to mention the fact that it looked like it was stuck to the hull without securing bolts. It was a terrible design - so terrible that it almost had to be deliberate. Benrey had seen many, many spaceships over the years, but he had never seen anything like this. 

Still, he shouldn’t waste time wondering at the intricacies of human stupidity. He darted forward, phased through the hull, and changed phase back to solid, mag-locking his boots to the hull for security. Benrey poked at the dishes and box panels for a few minutes, trying to determine what he could remove without completely destroying the ship’s ability to communicate. He didn’t want to lose access to things like the SOS signals, or broadcast updates, or signals from other ships that might get hit if they couldn’t talk to them. His perception zeroed in on the one box that actually _was_ secured to the hull with bolts. It was also the most protected, tucked up behind the physical shield panel, which would keep it from being affected by the mag-shields.

When Benrey pried it open something burst out and splattered into the vacuum, freezing into long spears of ice that dissolved as they passed out of the protected area around the ship and touched the echoes of ambient stellar radiation. Benrey watched this process with muted alarm - doubtlessly if someone had tried to open the panel planetside or on a space station, whatever that substance was would have splashed out onto them. Something about it had seemed familiar, but he didn’t want to spend time thinking about it now. It just suggested that he was looking at the right box.

Inside the box was a bundle of wires and boards, some of which were icing over already. Benrey hadn’t realized these mechanics weren’t space-safe, but this was just another example of poor design. He’d just have to work fast and hope that nothing was too important. 

Carefully, he pressed one hand into the box and let it change phase halfway, oozing into the cracks and crevices between the circuit boards and wires and switches. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he hoped he’d know it when he felt it - and then he did. There was an object clipped to one of the central boxes that a bundle of wires ran through, and it buzzed discordantly against Benrey’s surface as he touched it. For a split second he felt an answering chime in the nanochips running up the length of his arm. Acting completely on reflex, he tore the central box off, ripped the cords out of it, and hurled it away from the ship. Then he blinked after it as it spun slowly away and looked down at his hands. They were shaking. That...wasn’t right.

Benrey pushed the wires back under the panel and pressed it closed again, feeling it secure with a pressurized hiss. Hopefully there wasn’t anything essential in there, because he wasn’t sure the contents had survived their brief exposure to the vacuum of space.

He took a moment to truly stretch, tilting his body from side to side to bask in the buzzing warmth of background radiation and feel the pressure and pervasive chill of the vacuum. He had missed this, being stuck on a planet. But then again, if he was spaceside for a long time he’d probably miss being planetside. It had happened before, in a way…

Benrey snapped to awareness as he realised he could feel the nanochips again, all throughout his body this time, vibrating faintly in the echo of a signal pulse he hadn’t even noticed when he’d torn the central box loose and slung it into the void. He was attuned to the signal pulse, but it wasn’t meant to affect him - not like it would affect a human who had undergone the Supervisors’ treatment and had the right receptors.

In half a second Benrey phased back through the ship’s hull and arrowed through the upper bulkhead, following the trail of the pulse. It felt like a data burst, and Benrey didn’t know how much information it was meant to contain, or if it was going to just switch off inhibitors and send Bubby on a rampage through the ship. Either way, Benrey should have thought of this little bit of trickery - it was absolutely typical for the Supervisors to lay traps like that. He should have checked before pulling the connector box, but he'd felt the chips in his arm responding and he’d acted without thinking. That kind of reaction time had saved his life plenty of times before, but it also made planning ahead difficult.

Benrey reached Bubby’s location and pushed his awareness through the bulkhead, expanding his perception to take in as much as he could as quickly as he could. Unfortunately, there was a lot happening.

Bubby was in the hall near MedBay, and he wasn’t alone - Gordon and his kid were both there. Both of their visors were completely blacked out, and Benrey was just in time to see Bubby bring a silver baton down hard against the side of Gordon’s helmet, slamming his head into the wall and sending him collapsing to the ground in an ungainly sprawl. The kid yelped, but Bubby ignored him, spinning the baton in his grip and rearing back in preparation to stab it straight down through Gordon’s back - and okay, that was enough.

Benrey lunged out of the bulkhead and tackled Bubby, changing phase as he did so to give himself the solidity he needed to take the human down. But it was like wrestling with a robot - Bubby didn’t react to the sudden new attack, just yanked an arm free and started swinging the baton against Benrey’s side. He only got one good hit in before Benrey shoved another arm out of his shoulder and caught Bubby’s wrist, holding it out away from them both. Bubby redoubled his efforts, straining against Benrey’s hold, and Benrey manifested several more limbs to push him against the bulkhead and hold him there while he looked around to check for witnesses.

The whole struggle had taken only a few moments, and the child had barely moved, still calling for his dad. Benrey smacked at his arm display with an extra limb until the sabotage screen came up, then swiped beyond it and found another screen that was new to him - this one showing available suit hacks for anyone in a certain proximity. Both Gordon and his kid showed visor hacks, and Benrey jabbed the symbols for helmet comm hacks on both of them as well. Since the helmets were sealed, they wouldn’t be able to hear anything now unless it was close.

Benrey turned back to Bubby, who hadn’t made a sound the whole time. His jaw was tightly clenched and his eyes were wide and blank, darting between Benrey and the two orange-suited humans in the hall.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Benrey hissed, feeling the liquid burn at the back of his throat that meant his sweet voice was trying to emerge. He swallowed it down - he had to stick to words if he wanted to blend in. “You wanna be a puppet? Huh? Stinky little puppet man? Get a hold of yourself!” And he smacked the side of Bubby’s helmet with a half-formed limb.

Bubby jerked in his hold and coughed out a sharp bark of indecipherable sound. Benrey smacked him again. He was at a bit of a loss, and he still didn’t know what the data pulse had done. It might have burned Bubby out completely, leaving nothing but a husk of murderous rage that would go after the closest warm body. But it might have only been a failsafe, something meant to scramble the receptors in a treated human’s brain, making them vulnerable to reactionary emotions or other aspects of their surrounding environment. Benrey was hoping that whatever it was, percussive maintenance would fix it.

Then Bubby shook his head hard and gasped, sagging back against the wall. Benrey pulled back the extra limbs, switching his grip so one hand was holding Bubby’s wrist up and the other was flat against his opposite shoulder, keeping him pressed into the bulkhead.

“What the -” Bubby started to say, then looked up and saw Gordon’s crumpled form. He jolted, and then seemed to realize he had one arm still raised with a baton gripped tightly in his fist. He opened his hand with a jerk and the baton fell. Benrey cursed and dropped Bubby’s wrist, snapping his hand down to catch the metal rod before it hit the ground.

“Where did you even get this, bro?” Benrey said, raising it up to eye level. The handle was cyan, and it was telescoping, with each section able to collapse into the one below it at the press of a button. “Was this in your suit the whole time? What the _fuck_?”

“I don’t - I -” Bubby sounded lost and rattled, but he managed to draw himself together enough to rasp out “What happened?”

“You got hacked, bro,” Benrey said, stepping back once it was clear Bubby was no longer a danger to the other humans. “Supervisor signal-trap whammied you. Shoulda seen it, but...sorry.” He shrugged, still looking at the baton as he spun it in both hands and figured out how to collapse it down into the cyan handle. By itself, that looked familiar, and he glanced at the side of Bubby’s oxygen tanks as he turned to stare down the hall. With a triumphant huff, Benrey reached over and snapped the baton back into place on Bubby’s air pack. It blended right in with a trio of other rod-like protuberances. Benrey wondered if those were all batons, but this wasn’t the time to figure it out.

“I don’t...understand,” Bubby said, and Benrey glared up at him.

“You got turned into uh, a fuckin’ danger puppet and attacked Freeman, bro, what’s not to get?”

Bubby shook his head sharply, like he was trying to dislodge a bug. “I don’t -” he said.

“Dad, where _are_ you?” The kid’s voice was louder, like he was shouting in his helmet, and Benrey looked over to see that he was going to trip over his dad’s body in another step or two. He swore and lashed out with a tendril that couldn’t even be called a limb, just a long cord of his substance that took the kid out at the knees, sending him crashing to the floor as well. Benrey felt genuinely bad about that, but there was no time to deal with it.

“I’ll fix this,” Benrey said, and grabbed Bubby again. “Hold still.” Then he lurched sideways into the wall, curling his form out and around Bubby as he did so to drag him along. He brute-forced his way through the ship, and knew he was leaving a trail of damaged wires and bent piping, but he could deal with that later. If it was anyone else, there would be more time, but Gordon’s kid was going to reach him any second and then all hell would break loose.

Benrey glitched out of the wall in the alcove outside Admin and dumped Bubby on the ground. Bubby looked dazed, and Benrey hoped it was just the treatment holding his conscious mind down to make him more susceptible to suggestion from alien agents. But all Benrey wanted him to do was shut up and get himself together before the rest of the crew found out one of their own had been attacked. Hopefully the weird memory fuckery would work in their favor this time.

“Stay here,” Benrey told him, “'til your brain isn’t soup. You have no idea what happened.”

“I really don’t -” Bubby started to say, but Benrey was already darting back through the bulkheads. He tumbled out into the hallway just as Gordon’s kid bumped against his dad’s prone body. Benrey jerked halfway back into the bulkhead on instinct, then remembered the kid couldn’t see him and lurched out again, ripping a wall panel out with him this time and letting it fall on top of Gordon’s body with a dull thud. Violently-disconnected pipes started hissing just as the kid’s reaching hands found the smooth curve of his dad’s helmet, and Benrey dove half-gaseous over his head and spun around, reforming as he did, to grab the kid’s shoulder.

Which, in hindsight, was an obviously bad idea, but he was operating under less than optimal circumstances, even for him. Sure, there were times where he had to think fast to get himself out of a bad situation, but most of that was physically reacting. He typically didn’t have to problem solve like this. It made his head hurt.

In the meantime, the kid had jerked and twisted away from him with a wordless cry. Benrey swore and palmed the little helmet with one hand to keep the kid from pitching over onto his dad. He may have just dropped a wall on the guy, but at least he tried to do it gently. It took a second of fumbling to cancel the comms hack, and he didn’t realize he’d been babbling the whole time until the kid looked up in his direction and said his name.

“Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s me, just Benrey.” No one and nothing else, that’s for sure, definitely not Bubby too for a hot minute there.

“Where’s my dad?” The kid asked, and what the hell, he knew where he was, he had his hand right on his dad’s helmet. Did he think he was touching someone else’s body? Would that make him feel better? Benrey considered it for a moment before deciding he was going to have to hold one big lie in his head about what had happened, and there was no way he could remember more than that.

Instead he said, “It’s, uh, he’s right here,” and scooted around the kid to reach over and turn Gordon’s helmet toward himself, canceling his visor hack as he did. It took two button presses to do that - maybe because he hadn’t been the one to do it in the first place? Who knew. But when the visor cleared, Benrey flinched. Half of Gordon’s face was drenched in red blood, clashing garishly with the orange of his suit. It was starting to drip over his nose and pool in his facial hair, and Benrey was pretty sure the kid shouldn’t see this. Gordon had blood coming out of his nose, too, and his mouth - how _hard_ did Bubby hit him? Humans were so _fragile_...

“Okay, that’s not, uhhh -” Benrey fumbled with the wrist display to hack the visor dark again. But he couldn’t leave them both in the dark, the kid was already freaking out. “Huh, let me just - hang on, hold still, lemme see if I can -” He stabilized the kid’s helmet again with one hand to make sure it was just his helmet that would clear. When he could see the kid’s face it was tear-streaked and flinching at the light, and oh right, humans couldn’t adjust to light changes as quickly as Benrey could.

“Oh shit - shoot, sorry, should have warned you,” he said, but the kid was already scrambling away from him to lean over his dad’s helmet. The hissing from the broken pipes was still going, and Benrey realized he should probably call someone. Wasn’t there a feature for that, a report function or something?

He found the button - and it was a button, a bulky little cover on the side of his left middle finger that he could flick open with his thumb and then mash down on. An alert popped up on the inside of his visor asking for confirmation, and he confirmed and sent the report - a high-priority SOS ping with locational data that would take over the viewscreen of every crewmember who wasn’t in proximity - while the kid was still patting across Gordon’s head and shoulders with uncertain hands.

“He’s uh, he’s alive,” Benrey said, just in case the kid couldn’t tell, “but he doesn’t look...great. So I, uh, left his visor dark.” Oh shit, was someone going to ask about that? Did the kid understand that a crewmember shouldn’t be able to affect another’s helmet settings? Quick, deflect, say something else - “He doesn’t look great,” he said, and then realized he was repeating himself. Whoops. Hopefully the kid wouldn’t notice how shifty he was being. 

“He’s not _moving_ ,” the kid said insistently, and looked up at him with tearful eyes. He snuffled, which made Benrey twitch - was he sick? Would Gordon eat him if he got sick? Wait, no, humans didn’t eat their young, get it together - 

“Is he...is he gonna be okay?” Oh. He was crying. Good that he wasn’t sick, bad that he was having emotions Benrey didn’t know how to deal with. Benrey looked wildly up and down the hall. How far away was everyone? He could feel warm bodies moving fast toward him, but he was splitting his attention in too many directions and he couldn’t concentrate. 

“I, uh - m’sure he’s gonna be -” Benrey stuttered, trying to gauge distance. Someone was close, someone familiar, but which - “It’s prob'ly - oh hey, here’s - TOMMY!” Darnold and Tommy’s dog were right with him, but Benrey knew Tommy would know what to say to the kid. And Darnold would know how to fix Gordon.

There was a flurry of motion as others arrived, and they all helped move Gordon into the MedBay under Darnold’s direction. He kept cautioning them to be careful not to jostle Gordon in case of spinal damage, which sounded dumb, but Benrey wasn’t going to argue. At some point he realized there was a foreign pressure on the fabric of his suit, and he looked down to see that Gordon’s kid had one hand fisted around the kneepad on Benrey’s leg. 

...Huh. Weird.

“Benrey, what happened?” Tommy asked as Dr. Coomer and Darnold settled Gordon’s legs to lay him straight on the MedBay bed. Benrey looked down, but Gordon’s kid wasn’t paying them any attention, his visor pointed straight at the bed where his dad was laying very still.

Benrey wanted to scratch at his face, but the helmet was in the way. Instead, he settled for rubbing one hand up and down on the suit fabric over his other arm. He felt some sweet voice bubbling up, but chewed it back and swallowed it before Tommy could see. 

“I, uh, I dunno,” he said. “I was in the, uh, the reactor room, and was headed up toward the cafeteria when I heard a loud noise. Came around the corner and, uh, saw the kid and Freeman on the ground, and the wall panel was on top of him. I don’t, uh - there was something wrong with their helmets, but when I grabbed the kid’s helmet it must’ve, uh, shaken something loose, or...something, and his visor, uh, cleared up.” He fidgeted under Tommy’s earnest stare. “I didn’t want to, uh, bump Freeman’s head so I didn’t mess with his helmet.” Oh wait, fuck, yes he had, and he told the kid Gordon had looked bad. “It was, uh, glitching or something, though, and I saw blood, so I didn’t want the kid to see, so I didn’t try to fix it.” Nailed it.

Tommy was staring at him with a wrinkle in between his eyebrows, and Benrey was pretty sure that wasn’t a great thing, but he couldn’t remember. He glanced around and saw that Forzen had his head stuck in through the doorway, his mouth full of food under his hastily-attached helmet, complaining that he hadn’t been on the cameras to see Gordon get taken out by a wall. Benrey froze and choked back a burst of panic-pale sweet voice. He had forgotten about the cameras. How had he forgotten about the cameras? He’d have to fix that before Forzen got back to Security.

“Benrey?” Tommy said.

“Whuh?” Benrey hadn’t been paying attention.

“Are you - are you sure you didn’t see any- anyone else in the hallway?” Tommy asked, and he looked so...concerned. Who was he concerned about? Benrey? Gordon? The ship? All of the above?

“Yeah,” Benrey lied. “I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Tommy said, as Darnold pushed Forzen out of the doorway behind him.

“I have to seal the air shield, so everyone needs to get out,” a frazzled-looking Darnold told the room at large, before smiling softly down at Gordon’s kid, who was still attached to Benrey’s leg. “Not you, of course, Joshua. You can stay.”

Joshua. Right. Benrey knew that.

Tommy helped push everyone else out of the room, talking about having a meeting, which was a deeply awful idea. Benrey wasn’t looking forward to trying to lie again in front of everyone. But then Gordon’s kid - Joshua - took him by surprise by asking if Benrey could stay, too.

Darnold blinked and looked up at Benrey, opening his mouth as if he were about to say no - but whatever Benrey’s face looked like must have changed his mind, because he appeared startled and closed his mouth with a click. Benrey swallowed more sweet voice that burned like acid at the back of his throat as Darnold looked down at Joshua again and smiled.

“Sure,” he said, his words sounding only a little bit forced. “Benrey can stay, too.”

Benrey suddenly found himself in charge of distracting the kid - Joshua - while Darnold worked on Gordon. He had no idea what to do with a human child. He barely knew what to do with adult humans. Human children liked...playing, right? He’d seen the kid with toys in Black Mesa. He probably had toys. But when he asked if Joshua wanted to play a game, the kid just stared at him, his face still wet with tears and snot.

Okay, no help was coming from the kid himself. He looked up at Darnold, who glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. He was busy behind a sheet he’d pinned up to hide Gordon’s head from his kid, but he jerked his head down at the kid and widened his eyes. Whatever the fuck that meant, it wasn’t helpful, either.

What else did human children like? The coloring books were under the conference table, maybe if Benrey could get him to the cafeteria… “We could, um...get something to eat?”

“I’m not leaving my dad,” the kid said sharply. Okay then, no coloring books. “Do you...do you have food?” Ah, of course. Human children liked food.

“Uhhhh,” Benrey deflected, and looked up at Darnold in a panic. Darnold rolled his eyes and reached over to grab something off the overloaded medical cart next to the bed, tossing a bar through the air that Benrey caught on reflex.

Surprisingly, that mostly took care of the kid. There was a dangerous moment when he asked about Benrey’s eye color, and Benrey realized that with him sitting up on a bed, this was the closest they’d ever physically been to each other. Maybe he hadn’t noticed a difference before. Benrey had a second of panic before blurting out “contacts,” which seemed to satisfy the kid, who went back to fiddling with the chocolate chip granola bar wrapper and talking about cowboys. Benrey blinked hard, but he was pretty sure his eyes were as close to human-looking as he could get them while still being able to see enough to keep him oriented. No one else had asked, though, so maybe this was a human child curiosity thing.

Benrey fielded some more questions, then Darnold butted in to help when Benrey didn’t know how to keep saying the same thing in different ways, and then the kid - Joshua - kept kicking his feet, so Benrey pretended he was trying to pinch them, but always made sure to miss. It kept him entertained long enough for Darnold to finish with the regenerator and with cleaning Gordon up, after which they couldn’t have pried the kid from his dad’s side if they tried. 

Benrey leaned back against the bulkhead as Darnold puttered about, washing instruments and loading them into an autoclave for sterilization - which Benrey knew because Darnold kept quietly narrating everything he was doing. Benrey wasn’t sure if that was for his sake, Joshua’s, or Darnold’s own, but it allowed him to close his eyes and hum quietly to cover the sound of his form splitting and sinking into the bulkhead. 

He’d only tried this a few times with other people in the same room - mostly to mess with Forzen by moving something across the room while standing next to him - and this was going to be a far more complex task. But it was important. He had to do something about the camera footage before Forzen saw it. And he should probably make sure he hadn’t broken anything essential in his mad dash through the ship’s innards to get Bubby away from the crime scene. Why had that been such an important thing to do, anyway? It felt like he’d been acting on instinct, but his instinct has always been self-serving. Weird...but he’d deal with the philosophical aspects later.

He let his eyes droop almost closed in the MedBay and opened more eyes in Security. No one was there, and Benrey pushed enough of him through that he could fiddle with the controls with several hands, adjusting his eyes as he flicked through the archive footage of the correct hallway camera. And there it was - Bubby walking down the hall out of sight, then Gordon and Joshua coming into view at the edge of the camera’s field and pausing as their visors went dark. Then Bubby lunged back into frame, the baton already in his hand as he brought it down - and there was Benrey phasing through the wall and tackling him, their brief struggle, the kid looking very sad and tiny and alone as he stumbled closer to his dad’s prone form. Yeah, this was...this was pretty incriminating.

Benrey in the MedBay paused his humming for a moment to think, then Benrey in Security sighed heavily and got to work. This was going to take a while - but, judging by the raised voices he could hear coming from the conference table in the cafeteria, he had plenty of time to solve this problem. And hey - at least he wasn’t bored anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOD I AM SO SICK OF THE WALL INCIDENT SCENE. I have written it from three perspectives now, we are DONE. NO MORE WALLS. Only plot and imposters shenanigans. 
> 
> Come shout at me on tumblr @antilocaprine


	8. Waking Up to Ash and Dust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter one this time. Apologies for the delay, but I have been bitten by several new ideas and started multiple fics (and finished one) in between the last update and this one. Go check those out if you haven't already!

Gordon woke up slowly for once. It was nice to be able to just lay in bed, relaxed, head empty of thoughts, just breathing and thinking about the weird fucking dream he had. Something about the ship going haywire (of course), and his helmet taking damage...and Joshua’s voice…

Gordon’s eyes snapped open and he jerked up in bed, instantly getting tangled up in sheets that were tucked way tighter around him than he ever slept with. Where was he? Where was his helmet? Where was -

“Joshua,” Gordon gasped weakly as he continued to fight the sheets into allowing him to sit upright. “Josh-”

Part of the sheet came loose abruptly, like a weight had lifted, and purely by reflex Gordon twisted and caught the weight before it rolled off the bed completely. The fact that it turned out to be his son was a plus. That was one less thing he had to worry about. But wait, Joshua wasn’t wearing his helmet either, it was clattering across the floor, and _where were they_ \- 

“Dr. Freeman, it’s okay!” Darnold’s voice pulled Gordon out of his panicked half-awake state, and he blinked hard and reeled Joshua in to plop him on his lap. “You’re okay, everything’s fine,” Darnold continued, hands held out placatingly. “There was an accident, but it’s all right now.”

Gordon took a deep breath and let it out shakily as Joshua wrapped his arms tightly around Gordon’s torso as far as he could reach. The room was fuzzy and unfocused, but Gordon could see enough details now to tell it was the Medbay. 

“What - what happened?” Gordon rasped, then winced at the roughness of his dry throat. Now that there appeared to be no more danger of flailing limbs, Darnold stepped forward and offered a water pouch. Gordon took it gratefully and drank the whole thing down in three swallows, keeping the last mouthful to slosh around and rinse his mouth with. His tongue tasted gross, and his teeth felt fuzzy, and he was still very confused.

“There was a structural integrity issue with a wall panel,” Darnold said, picking up a handheld scanner and pointing it at Gordon’s head. It chirped brightly, and he adjusted the angle until it chirped again, and again. He made a face and pulled the scanner back, tapping it against the lower half of his visor. “How does your head feel?”

“My head? It’s...uh…” Gordon frowned, tilting his head and working his jaw and ow, yeah, that hurt. He brought one hand up to rub against the aching joint of his jaw, high under his cheekbone. And his head was still pounding, so maybe that wasn’t from waking up so suddenly. “It hurts. What hit me?”

Darnold tilted his head. “What do you remember?”

Gordon wracked his brain while he tilted his head down to check on Joshua, one hand still on Joshie’s back to hold him in place. His neck twinged and he winced slightly.

“I’ll get some more painkillers,” Darnold said. “Keep thinking about the last thing you remember.”

“The comms were down,” Gordon said slowly, “right? They kept… they kept cutting in and out, but I don’t...I don’t remember if we fixed them or not.”

Darnold held out a pair of pills and Gordon took them from him, tossing them into his mouth and washing them down with the new water pouch Darnold handed him. His expression was neutral - Gordon couldn’t tell if he was doing good or bad with this brain evaluation thing.

“Anything else?”

Gordon’s stomach gurgled with the addition of the water. “Oh, we were going to get lunch, right?”

Joshua nodded against his chest, then tensed and looked up at Darnold with a worried expression. Darnold smiled down at him and held up a hand in an “it’s okay” gesture. That suggested Joshua had probably been coached not to say anything to jog Gordon’s memory, so Darnold could get a good idea of what damage was actually done.

Gordon huffed out a sigh and closed his eyes. The lights were dimmer than normal - maybe it was the night cycle, or maybe they were dim for his benefit. Either way, the pressure behind his eyes felt better, and the cool dark was almost relaxing - until he remembered the last darkness, and then it wasn’t.

“It was dark,” Gordon said, dragging his eyes open. “Our helmets went dark. Joshua’s, then mine. I don’t - I don’t remember anything after that.”

“Okay,” Darnold said after a moment. “Good. Looks like your memory is mostly intact. You might remember bits and pieces over the coming days, but by the sound of it, your brain retained its memories up until you got whacked in the head by a wall panel.”

“How...why is that a thing?” Gordon asked. He had known the ship was in bad shape, but if it was going to be literally falling apart, they might have to talk about aborting the mission.

Darnold shrugged. “We’re looking into it. Right now it looks like one of the air lines had a link that blew out, and the high pressure pushed the panel loose. The rest of the crew is fixing it and checking the other lines for weaknesses.” He pointed the scanner at Gordon again, and pursed his lips at whatever came up on the screen. “Right now, you need to stay right here and recuperate. You should be fine in an hour or so, but the meds need a little more time to do their job.” 

“Yeah, sure,” Gordon mumbled, then looked down at Joshua, his free hand rubbing circles on Joshie's back. “How’re you doing, kiddo? I’m sorry this happened.”

Joshua shrugged under his hand. “I’m okay,” he said in a small voice. “It was scary, but Benrey found us and fixed my helmet and called for help.”

Gordon blinked at him. “What? Really?” He wouldn’t have expected that. Benrey never seemed like the helpful type.

“Yeah, he was really nice, and he stayed with me when you were...asleep.”

“Oh...okay. I’m sorry I got knocked out, but I’m glad there was someone there to help. Did the others help you, too?” Maybe he could steer Joshua’s appreciation away from the weirdest of their crewmates.

But Joshie just shrugged again. “Sunkist helped.”

“That’s...that’s great, buddy. Anyone else?” Preferably someone human? His kid shouldn’t be relying on a fucking dog for comfort, even if said dog _was_ enormous and more than capable of taking out threats. He’d seen her neatly rip the sleeve off a creepy guy who was trying to grab Tommy in the Black Mesa tunnels, once, and Gordon knew that if that wasn’t enough of a deterrent, she would have taken the guy’s arm off, next.

“Dr. Pepper’s been teaching me about medical stuff,” Joshua was saying, and yeah, okay, that’ll do.

“Oh, cool! And what have you learned?”

“He said if Benrey hadn’t found us when he did, you might have had…‘permanent traumatic cerebral damage.’” He said the words carefully, obviously trying to make sure he was pronouncing them correctly. Gordon’s eyes darted over to where Darnold was cringing over a rack of glass vials with colored liquid in them. Darnold made an apologetic face at him and shrugged, then nodded in agreement.

Internally, Gordon said some very bad words. Then he resigned himself to this being a thing. Hopefully the whole ‘Benrey saved our lives’ hero worship wouldn’t last as long as Joshua’s cowboy phase was lasting.

“Well,” Gordon sighed, “I guess I’ll have to thank him the next time I see him.” Hopefully that wouldn’t be for a while - at least not until his head felt clearer. The drugs Darnold had given him were really good, and the regenerator always made fresh skin tingle and pulse as the nerves reconnected, so Gordon was feeling generally off. He could barely put up with Benrey on the best of days, and this had been one hell of a bad day.

“You can say thanks now!” Joshua said cheerfully.

Gordon blinked dumbly down at him. “I’m sorry, what?”

But Joshua was already wiggling around in Gordon’s lap to look over his own shoulder, waving at the far corner of the room that Gordon assumed had been darkened for his benefit. Without his glasses it was hard to make out details, but he could still see shapes and movement - so he could tell immediately when the dark crewmate suit detached itself from the shadows near the door and stepped forward.

Gordon jolted and barely managed to save himself from swearing. “What the fff- _fudge_ , have you been here the _whole time_?” He clamped his hands around Joshua more tightly on reflex, and the IV needles twinged sharply under his skin, forcing him to relax his grip. Some sensor chirped, and Darnold made a noise and hurried over, reaching up to reset something on the drip bag and then picking up Gordon’s hand and checking the needles. Gordon ignored him, fully focused on Benrey, who had stopped stock-still and was staring at him over several empty beds.

“ _Daaad_ ,” Joshua whined with obvious exasperation. “I _told_ you. He stayed while you were asleep.”

“Not asleep, unconscious,” Darnold said absently. “But yes, Benrey’s been here the whole time. Here.”

Gordon took his glasses from Darnold and fitted them awkwardly onto his face. Benrey was still focused on him, unblinking. It was the same predatory gaze he had turned on Joshua earlier in the day, the look that made Gordon want to either punch him or run far away from him. His fight or flight response was skewed almost entirely toward “fight,” though, so no matter how much Benrey was creeping him out, Gordon would much rather throw down than let him think he’d won whatever the hell game he was playing.

“Look,” Gordon started. “I don’t know what -”

“You’re welcome,” Benrey interrupted.

Gordon gaped for a moment, completely poleaxed. It was such an immature thing to say - but then again, he had no idea how old Benrey even was. 

“ _What_?”

“You’re welcome,” Benrey said again. “Y’know, uh, your kid has much better manners than you.” Then he winked - _winked!_ \- at Joshua, and Joshie - Joshie fucking _chortled_. 

Gordon either needed way more drugs or way fewer drugs for this interaction. Either way, he couldn’t handle it. But, damn it, Benrey was _right_. Gordon should be setting an example. He should always be setting an example. So instead of flying off the handle like he so wanted to do, he took a breath and rearranged his face into something that was hopefully more friendly than his previous glare.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Thank you, Benrey. I appreciate you looking after Joshua while I was...indisposed. And I’m - I’m glad you found us when you did. It sounds like things could have been much worse if you hadn’t.”

Benrey mumbled something that sounded like “you don’t even know” before huffing and fiddling with the buckles on his suit. “Yeah, okay,” he said more clearly. “You’re welcome. Again.” Then he gestured at Joshua. “You good, larval Freeman? Am I, uh, free to go, officer?”

Before Gordon could ask him what the fuck he meant by that, Joshua was nodding. “Thanks for staying with us,” he said, then buried his face in Gordon’s chest, suddenly overcome with shyness. 

“Yeah,” Gordon said, the words thick in his mouth. “Thanks again.” 

But Benrey was already headed for the door. He paused at the keypad, then the airshield hissed as he walked through before it resealed behind him.

“You were mean,” Joshie whispered into Gordon’s collarbone, so quietly he could barely hear it, and Gordon hated to admit it, but his kid was probably right. It seemed like this whole day had been a series of missteps on Gordon’s part. Forzen, Bubby, Benrey… He should be able to handle acerbic personalities better. Not everyone could be like Dr. Coomer, or Tommy, or Darnold -

“Well,” Darnold said suddenly, making Gordon twitch again. “That was nice. Now let me check your pupils, please.”

Gordon sighed, then turned his back to the door to let Darnold continue with his tests.

* * * * *

In the hallway outside MedBay, Benrey leaned against the wall and clutched at the chest of his suit. For some reason, it was momentarily difficult to breathe. Maybe because Freeman had thanked him - more than once, even! And it almost sounded sincere! Maybe the guy wasn’t a complete asshole all the time. And his kid was turning out to be pretty okay, too.

Feelings aside, Benrey wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself now. He didn’t want to go to the cafeteria - he could sense that several people were still in there, and he didn’t want to deal with anyone right now. He’d fixed the camera problem - he didn’t have enough technical knowledge to be able to splice in fake footage, so he’d just deleted the footage of the hallway struggle altogether. Then he’d had a stroke of genius, and deleted several other chunks of footage to make it look like a bug or something. Hopefully that would be enough. If not, he’d just fry the system. 

His musings were interrupted by a new sensation from the suit - a barely-there vibration under the control panel on his arm. He raised his wrist and stared at the control screen, but nothing looked different. He poked at it, and the screen flickered. Huh. Weird.

The buzzing didn’t stop. Benrey phased his arm inside the suit to something more gaseous and pushed it into the suit itself, working semi-solid fingers under the internal edge of the control panel. He found a button. He pressed the button.

Nothing bad ever came from pressing mysterious buttons, right?

The screen flickered again, then went black and showed a single line of light blue text.

>> _We need to talk_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God _dammit_ , I thought I was done with the _fucking_ wall scene, but they _still had to explain it to Gordon_. So _now_ I'm done with it. Definitely. No more walls. The ship no longer has walls, I can't deal with it.
> 
> Come shout at me on Tumblr @Antilocaprine


	9. Brain Games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to write a scene between two characters with names that are a similar length that both start with "B" is actually a nightmare. I'm going to have to reread this in a few days to make sure I didn't switch them anywhere, because my brain literally cannot tell them apart any more. But hey, we're finally away from the goddamn wall and moving on with plot stuff. Thank you all for your patience.

Bubby was starting to feel like he was back in his tube. He was getting the same sense of wavering unreality that often plagued him when he was suspended in liquid, surrounded by bustling shapes that scribbled on clipboards and checked the screens attached to the glass and never quite looked him in the eye. 

Harold was different, of course. He had always been the exception to everything in Bubby’s life.

But now...Bubby knew he was on a spaceship, and he knew that ship had an agenda: find a new route around the Aperture asteroid field since the old route had been taken over by debris from the destroyed moon, and, if possible, find out what happened to the previous ships sent to do the same thing that had vanished. But he was starting to feel flashes of pressure to complete another goal, one that he could never quite hold in his mind long enough to remember. 

He had tried asking Harold about it, carefully wording his questions, but he’d just gotten blank looks and uncertain answers, and he hated seeing Harold look at him with anything close to distress, so he stopped asking. But he didn’t stop wondering, and kept worrying at those nebulous thoughts like they were a loose tooth.

And then he woke up to fucking _Benrey_ snarling in his face and holding his arms, one of which was holding some sort of baton with a handle the same color as Bubby’s suit - and Gordon _fucking_ Freeman was unmoving on the ground behind Benrey. And Gordon’s kid was there. Of course. The last thing Bubby remembered before that was making his way back toward Navigation, fuming about Gordon’s behavior. But he would never do something like this, especially not in front of the kid - right?

Benrey did something impossible to get them both out of that hall and dropped Bubby in the alcove outside Admin, then vanished again - into the _ceiling_ , what the _fuck_ \- before Bubby had a chance to tell him he didn’t know what the hell was going on.

He’d managed to mostly keep it together through joining up with Harold again, helping get Gordon into Medbay, and the high-volume meeting that followed, but after that he’d retired to his sleeping compartment, and he was starting to think he was losing his mind. A moment after he closed the door, he’d found himself raising his arm and swiping the control panel to a screen he’d never seen before. It was automatic - muscle memory - and as soon as he realized he was doing it he froze, staring down at the red symbols throughout the ship diagram. His hand moved again - this time he couldn’t stop it, and that terrified him enough that he almost missed the connection between tapping a symbol and an alarm going off in his helmet to signal that the comms were down. But the comms were already down - they’d been rerouted through a local interface so the crew could talk to each other on the ship - so this system change didn’t actually do anything.

That didn’t seem to matter to Bubby’s hand, which swiped back to the normal arm screen and tried to drop back to his side. He caught himself as he regained control, jerking his arms so hard that he smacked himself in the helmet. The sudden shock of pain startled him enough to realize he could feel his thoughts slipping away again, trying to change his train of thought to something unrelated to what he’d just done...and what had he just done? There had been...something…

Bubby panicked, and did something he’d started to do toward the end of his time in his tube. He yanked off his helmet, spun around, and slammed his forehead against the wall.

The pain sharpened his thoughts - counterintuitive, but he wasn’t exactly a proper human, head injuries had never affected him as much as the scientists claimed they were supposed to - and he remembered the changing arm panel. He brought it back up and swiped madly at it, cycling through screens he knew for a fact weren’t on anyone else’s suit. “Ship Sabotage,” “Crew Sabotage,” “Collaboration” - and that one was obviously some sort of text-based chat feature. But with who? Whoever was controlling him? But they were _controlling_ him, they didn’t need to “collaborate” with him. It was far more likely that it was someone else on the ship...someone else who had shown signs of knowing what was...what was going on…

Bubby headbutted the wall again, and his mind sharpened. Before he could lose his train of thought, he typed out “we need to talk” and hit “send.” Hopefully that was vague enough that if it went to the wrong person, it wouldn’t be suspicious. 

He was considering sending something to express the urgency of his situation when Benrey walked through his door. He didn’t open it first, he just stepped through it like it was an air shield. 

“‘Sup?” Benrey said, and he leaned casually back against the opposite wall.

Bubby stared at him.

Benrey’s eyebrows drew down over his weird-ass eyes. “Uh...are you -”

“What the fuck is going on?” Bubby snapped. “What are we doing here? I don’t - I can’t remember - are you controlling me?”

“What? No. Gross.”

“Then what - what are -” His thoughts were fading again, and without hesitation he jerked his head sideways to crack his skull against the bulkhead again.

Benrey jumped. “Whuh - what was that?”

“I am _trying_ ,” Bubby gritted out, “to _remember_ what’s happening. That helps.”

“Fuckin’...weird, but okay.” Benrey looked unsettled. “D’you...you want me to try to wreck your chip?”

“My what?”

“Your chip,” Benrey said, and waggled one hand around at a level with his temple. “The treatment usually has a chip to go with the, uh, the spores.”

Bubby was reeling from the casual nature of the infodump. Benrey was speaking in a way that suggested he assumed Bubby knew what he was talking about, but Bubby had no clue what was going on. “Like a microchip?” he asked, grasping at understanding like a man on a high cliff, struggling to keep his hold with a yawning abyss inches from his toes.

Benrey shrugged. “Dunno. It just, uh, fries your brain so you forget stuff.”

Bubby lurched forward and grabbed Benrey’s shoulders. “ _That’s_ what’s happening? Get it out!”

Benrey leaned back uncomfortably, but raised a hand to flick his visor up and squint at Bubby’s face without actually shaking him off. “Lemme see if I can find it,” he muttered absently. “Hang on, don’t - don’t move…”

Bubby froze, and he wasn’t sure if it was his own idea to do so or not. Benrey’s face went blank - blanker than normal - and his eyes flickered, went iridescent, then changed in a way that Bubby’s mind couldn’t understand, and he hoped that Benrey let him move soon to hit his head on the wall again, because if not this was going to break his brain and he’d forget again, and again, and again -

“Oh, that sucks,” Benrey said, blinking, and Bubby let go of him and took a step to smack his head on the wall. Well, the door this time, but same idea.

“What sucks?” he asked, shaking his head to rid the ringing from his ears.

Benrey was grimacing. “Could you - could you not do that? S’creepy n’shit.”

“I’d love to,” Bubby said manically. “Get this chip out of me and I will _gladly_ stop giving myself concussions.”

“It’s, uh, between your brain-bits.”

“My _what_?”

“Your - the two -” Benrey held his fists together. “Your brain’s got two bits and the chip’s between them.”

“The _hemispheres_? It’s between my hemispheres?”

Benrey chuckled nervously. “Isn’t that a planet thing?”

“Not - it doesn’t matter. Can you do something to - oh I don’t know, disable it?”

“I can take it out, bro,” Benrey said patiently, and waved his hands through each other. “I can - I mean, you saw - with the door - and before, when we left the scene of the crime -”

Bubby moved without thinking, shoving both hands against the front of Benrey’s helmet over his mouth. “Shhh! Don’t say - don’t -” He wavered, uncertain why he had just reacted the way he did. 

Benrey blinked at him, then huffed out a breath. “Yeah, we gotta get that out. Go sit on the floor.”

Again Bubby moved without thinking, and behind him, he heard Benrey hiss.

“Shit, sorry, I forget - I forgot. That’ll be better after I, uh, get the chip out.”

From the floor, he looked like a monster with his weird eyes and dark shadows over half his face, the helmet that covered most of his head changing his expressions, and the fluid, predatory way he moved as he stepped around Bubby to crouch beside him. There wasn’t much space in the sleeping compartment, though, and after a moment, Benrey made a noise and moved to crouch behind Bubby. He felt gloved hands hold his head steady with surprising care, and he had a thought that maybe Benrey couldn’t feel solid objects, and didn’t know how much pressure to exert. But it was just a thought.

“Hold still, okay?” Benrey said quietly. “I’ll hold your head, but if you try to move, you’ll, uh, prolly break your neck. I dunno. Just don’t move. This, uh, might hurt, but it shouldn’t. ...I think.” 

Bubby was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to hear that last part, but he did. So that was decidedly not reassuring.

Benrey moved without warning, and Bubby felt a sensation like ice water dripping into his skull. He was glad he couldn’t see what was going on - but then he realized he had a second shadow extending in front of him that flickered and darted as if the light source was jerking around.

“What’s that light?” Bubby asked, carefully not moving his head.

“Eyes,” Benrey grunted. “Gotta see in. Shut up.”

Well fine then. Bubby gritted his teeth against the bizarre sensations in his skull. There was a building pressure behind his eyes, and he knew there were no nerves in the brain, but he could have sworn he felt things moving inside his head. He didn’t like it.

And then the door opened, and Harold was there, and oh, no, this was bad.

“Bubby, I just wanted to check -” Harold was saying, but then he must have registered what he was seeing, and he cut himself off with a gasp of shock.

Bubby snapped one arm out and held his hand up, palm out. Benrey rumbled behind him, but Bubby hadn’t moved his head, so he didn’t get to talk.

“Harold, please,” Bubby said quickly, “it’s fine, it’s okay, he’s helping. Close the door, please.”

“What _is_ that?” Harold said, his eyes huge. “Or - _who_ is - _Benrey_?”

“Busy,” Benrey growled. He was starting to sound very odd.

“I can see that,” Harold said quietly. “And what exactly -”

“Harold, the _door_ ,” Bubby whined. He didn’t know why he was so insistent on that any more than he’d known why he tried to shut Benrey up earlier, even though there hadn’t been anyone else there at the time. All he knew was that secrecy was of the utmost importance because...because he needed…

“Oh shit, there he goes,” Benrey said, and Bubby felt two hands clasp tight around his own outstretched glove. He blinked back into himself to find Harold crouched in front of him, peering at his face with concern in his beautiful eyes.

“Bubby dear, this has been happening more lately, hasn’t it?” 

Bubby’s stomach swooped. Harold knew? He knew what was happening to Bubby and he didn’t say anything?

“What?” he whispered shakily, and Harold’s face softened. 

“Oh dear, I thought you knew. I was afraid it was age-related memory loss, but I didn’t think it likely that you would have been allowed to develop a flaw such as that. Then I thought you might have been taken and replaced since I saw you last, but I see now that our good friend Benrey is the alien threat! Though,” he added contemplatively, looking over Bubby’s head, “I suppose I can’t call him a threat if he is, indeed, helping with whatever involves shoving his hand into your skull.”

“He’s…I think...” Bubby’s thoughts were wandering again, and he went to twitch sideways to knock his skull against something and shake his thoughts back into order, but something tightened on both sides of his head - the padded clamps, he was back on the table - but no, he was upright, and Harold was there, and Harold wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him - right? But then again, how long had they been apart? And hadn’t their parting been Bubby’s fault in the first place for feeling scared and lashing out, pushing away the one person in his life who had always looked at him like he was a person instead of an experiment, a tool, a _thing_? 

“Whatever you’re doing,” Harold said, his face tight, “please hurry.”

“S’brain surgery,” someone said from behind Bubby, and he relaxed slightly. That voice knew what to do. It would tell him what to do. “Y’can’t rush brain surgery.”

“Do you even know how human brains work?” Harold asked.

“Whuh? Yeah. No. M’just - trying not to hit anything. S’like the, uh, the old game, with the buzzer an’ shit.”

“Do you mean Operation?” Harold asked, and of course he knew that, he was _so_ smart. “Operation is a battery-operated game of physical skill that tests players' hand-eye coordination and fine motor - oh dear. How well did you do at that game?”

“Not great,” the voice behind Bubby said - and then his head exploded.

Well, it didn’t really, but it sure as hell felt like it did, and he keened at the pain and pressure in his skull. He arched his back, and felt hands come down on his shoulders to keep him seated. There were already hands on his arms, and on his head, and another pair stabilizing his neck, but there was no way that many people could fit in here, so Bubby didn’t know what was going on. He realized his eyes were squeezed shut and wrenched them open - and this was worse, this was so much worse. He was staring at a bare metal ceiling. His head was clamped still. There were tight grips on his body, keeping him from moving. And above him - over him - there was an elongated, shadowy creature with flashlight-bright eyes, too many eyes to be human. Bubby thought he got _out_ , he thought they were _done_ with him, how was he _back_?

“No,” he gasped weakly, “no, no, not _again_ -”

“Bubby, dear, I’m here -” That was Harold. What was Harold doing here? Were they going to put him in a tube, too? But then Harold continued in a harsher voice, speaking to someone else: “What are you _doing_? Stop hurting him!” His voice softened again as he added “It’s all right, Bubby, I’m right here.”

That - that didn’t make any sense. Was Harold helping the shadowy beings? Bubby tried to move his head down to look for his old friend, but whatever was holding his head wouldn’t let him move, even as it continued to drag what felt like a fiery spear through his brain. He clenched his teeth and whined again, a high reedy protest. He should be used to things happening to him without his consent, but he hated it, hated the loss of control, and the confusion, and the pain.

The shadowy shape made a triumphant noise. “Got it!”

Bubby was suddenly free, and all the energy he’d been putting into pulling away from the thing holding his head was converted into forward motion, sending him crashing into Harold’s chest and knocking them both over onto the floor. Harold automatically brought his arms up to catch Bubby as he tumbled across Harold’s torso, but Bubby twisted away and scrambled to his knees so he could turn around.

Benrey had his back against the bulkhead and his legs kicked out in front of him in an exhausted sprawl. He only had two eyes now, but they looked sunken and dark-edged, even as they glowed with an unearthly light. He was slouched sideways, one shoulder against Bubby’s bed, and he had too many arms, but somehow all of them were still encased in the space suit: he just had a lot more sleeves and gloves emerging from the suit's body. One hand was up in front of his face, and something tiny glinted where it was clenched between his thumb and fingertip.

Bubby relaxed slowly as his mind settled. That had been the goal of the pain. He’d agreed to having this done, because it meant he would be able to remember. 

But the memories weren’t good.

“Oh, hell,” he whispered. “Is Gordon - and his kid, are they -”

“They’re both fine,” Harold said, and oh, _Harold_.

Bubby turned back and wrapped his arms around him, burying his face in the uncomfortable juncture of Harold’s shoulder where the suit could connect to its helmet. But Harold wasn’t wearing his helmet right now, and Bubby could breathe him in. He smelled just the same. Bubby hadn’t hugged him since the first day of training, and now he remembered that something had been telling him not to get too close to his crewmates, to keep his distance, stay aloof, and wait for the right time to act. But that artificial shield between him and the world was gone, now, and he tightened his grip until he could feel Harold’s ribs expand as he took a breath. 

“Oh,” Harold said, and when he continued Bubby could hear the smile in his voice. “ _There_ you are.”

“Di’ I break ‘im?” Benrey slurred, and Harold laughed. 

“Of course not! However, I would like to know what you did do. That little thing looks dangerous.”

“It’s a chip,” Bubby mumbled into Harold’s shoulder. “They were using it to control me.”

“Uh, not really,” Benrey said, and that made Bubby raise his head to glare at him. Benrey weakly held up several hands. “The chip was just a, uh, a go-between, and made you forget stuff. You still got the spores.”

There was a moment where no one said anything. Benrey still looked exhausted, Bubby’s head was aching, and Harold was somehow taking this better than the people actually involved with...whatever the fuck this was.

“Well,” Harold said brightly, “Since you seem to know what’s going on, I think you’d better tell us _everything_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come yell at me on Tumblr @Antilocaprine


End file.
